More Barrington Bay Music Club Membership Benefits!

I have been collecting guitar magazines since I started playing in the late 80's.  I have decided to set up a small library of these magazines.  BBM Club members will be able to "borrow" magazines for a nominal fee of $1 per magazine.  This charge is largely to allow me to continue to purchase new magazines as well as to replace magazines if any go "missing" (though I know that won't happen).

Remember, membership is free, and you can join by coming into the store and filling out the Membership Form, or apply online.  If you sign up online, your card will be here waiting for you.

 March BBM Club Special

I've created a guitar players pack especially for BBM Club members.  This pack includes a strap, polish and cloth, a peg winder, a pick holder and a variety pack of picks.

Retail cost on these items is $25.34 ($28.88 after taxes), but for BBM Club members it's only $20.00 taxes included.

Additionally, add any set of strings for 20% off or upgrade the strap and take $8.00 off the cost of the new strap.

This offer is only good until March 31.

Jam Sessions

We've now completed two cycles of Jam Sessions; these get better and better.

The acoustic jam on Feb 11th was attended by about nine guitarists... and a ukulele player.  Nigel d'Eon brought his skull-and-crossbones case containing his ukuleles, and astounded quite a few people with his ability and showmanship.  I was amazed that a ukulele could be made to sound like that.

The acoustic jam brought out a few other new people, and everyone had a good time playing and learning from one another.

February 25th's electric jam wasn't attended by as many as the first, but this allowed players more time to play without having to worry about letting others play.

Nigel also brought his ukuleles to this and was gracious enough to let a few other players try one of his electric acoustic ukes.

I took a few pictures and have put them in the Jams Gallery.

Tech Talk

This month I want to talk about pickups.  This will be a multi-part article due to the huge amount of information about pickups.  This article will discuss what a pickup is and how it works.

A guitar pickup is a simple electro-magnetic device.

In its simplest form, the standard "single coil" guitar pickup, as fitted to Tele or Strat style instruments, the pickup consists of  (usually) six permanent magnets, with several thousand turns of fine copper wire wound around them.

To those of you who still remember physics lessons in school, this should bring to mind the definition of a basic generator or dynamo - "The production of an electrical potential difference (or voltage) across a conductor situated in a changing magnetic flux".

Let me explain this: We all know that magnets have a field around them, it's why you can pull a bolt to a magnet from a short distance.  When the magnets are wrapped in coils of wire, the same magnetic field exerts itself on the electrons of the copper wire.  When a string is struck, it moves back and forth over the magnet interfering with the magnetic field, causing it to change or flux.  The magnetic flux created moves electrons through the wire at specific rates or frequencies which the amplifier then amplifies and converts into sound through the speaker.

Anyone who has played a single coil pickup knows they are equally effective at picking up stray 50 or 60Hz fields radiated by AC mains, wiring and equipment as they are at picking up the vibration of the strings!  This led to the development of the "humbucking" pickup. This is again a simple device, imagine two single coil pickups placed side by side and both connected in series (one after the other)- if these pickups were identical, then they would both pick up the same amount of string vibration and background hum: the voltages would be added together but the ratio of signal to noise would be the same.

The clever twist that makes the humbucker so effective is that in one pickup, the permanent magnets are effectively mounted upside down and the coil is reversed.  What this means is that the pickup will have a bar magnet wide enough to cover both coils, where one half of the pickup will have the polepieces touching the magnetic "north" side of the magnet and the other half will touch magnetic "south".  The "south" coil will be wound in the opposite direction of the north coil.

This effectively means that the signal produced by the vibrating string is unchanged, whereas the hum signal produced by pickup of stray magnetic fields is reversed (remember that the string signal is produced by the interaction of the magnet and the coil, but the hum is purely picked up by the coil). When the signals from the two coils are mixed together, the signal from the vibrating strings is effectively twice that of a single coil, but the hum signal is reduced to almost zero, as the hum signal from the two coils have opposite polarities.

Changing the pickups in your guitar could be the difference in making a crappy guitar good, a good guitar great, or a great guitar spectacular.  Come by the store and we'll discuss pickup options and costs, as well as try to answer any questions you have.  We do guitar repairs and will replace your pickups for you.

Next month we'll talk about the different types of pickups and the different sounds they produce.

Rentable Space

I've been approached by a local band to know if I'd be willing to rent out the store (after hours) for practices.  I haven't made a final decision as of yet, but I'm curious how many bands are looking for jam/practice space and whether this would be worthwhile.

If you or your band are looking for a place to jam or practice, contact me through the store or the website with your information and preferred days, and if there's enough interest I'll draw up a schedule and fee structure.