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Tone
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== Pickups ==
Pickups are often an instrumental part of the tone, so be sure to [[Choosing Pickups|choose good ones]] for your guitar. There's no universal answer for what to get - the ideal choice depends on your guitar's tone (generally indicated from the mass and type of wood its made from), your desired tone, your amp or other distortion stages, and your playing style. Guitar manufacturers often outfit low to midrange guitars with crummy, in-house pickups. But even a somewhat high-end guitar might have poor stock pickups. Aside from being deficient in certain frequencies, poor pickups generally have a very poor signal-to-noise ratio. Its It's usually the first thing I look to replace in a guitar, as it has a very large impact on tone.
Some things to consider :
* High output has become an arms race for pickup manufacturers, but modern high-gain amps don't need high output to be driven to saturated distortion. Gain levels can also be augmented by a boost pedal, so high output is often completely unnecessary. And in the case of many digital devices, high output will pickups can cause input clipping. For some amps, you will get distortion even on the clean channel with minimum gain. I do use high output passive humbuckers, but they don't reach the extreme degrees that many actives and some super-hot passives deliver. I've used such actives and found the output to be a severe negative rather than a positive.
* Magnet types can give you a good indication about the response of a pickup, but design still matters.
* Pay attention to the relative frequency response metrics given by a manufacturer. This will have a big impact on distorted tone. See [[#Boosts and Frequency Response|below]].