 Hi, we're going to start out our jazz curriculum for guitar with just a few basics of how your guitar works and the different parts of your guitar. Now, a lot of you guys coming into this jazz program probably know this stuff, but I want to just make sure that you have a good feel for it. Probably many of you are working with a guitar with two pickups, and I'm guessing some of you know that there are two different kinds generally of pickups that you might be dealing with, either humbucker pickups or single coil pickups. Strats or strat copies tend to have the single coils, and less Pauls and less Paul copies and things that try to gain that sound have the humbuckers. This particular guitar that I'm using has the humbucker pickups on it, and it gets a little bit more of a buttery sound, so that's why I like to use it for jazz, but whatever guitar you have you can definitely use. The main thing I want you to know as we talk through this is how the tone controls and the switches on your guitar work and what they do. So essentially for most electric guitars that you're coming in with, you're going to have a volume control for each pickup, and you're going to have a tone control for each pickup. Now your guitar might be different, I'm going to show you how this guitar works and then see if you can figure out how that relates to your own instrument. Let's start with the switch on the guitar. The switch on the guitar is essentially choosing which pickup is going to be working, which pickup is going to be essentially the microphone through which the strings are amplified. The two pickups have very different roles. Typically this back pickup is thought to be for leads and for a snappier sound, a real kind of crisp, trebly sound, whereas the front pickup is more for a warmer sound. I like it a lot for strumming and for what we call comping on the guitar. So this switch will choose the pickup that we use. And just one little thing about how the pickups work and why they sound the way they do. I want you to think about the way a string vibrates when it's plucked. At the ends, by the bridge and the nut, that vibration is kind of a small vibration. It's real tight and it's close to where that string is stopped. And as it gets closer to the center, the string is vibrating on a wider rotation. So the pickup that's closer to the thin, small rotation is a much more trebly sound. And as it comes out the string and it's a wider rotation, you get sort of that warmer fatter sound. So you can think about how those pickups sound in relationship to that concept. This switch on this particular guitar, when it's thrown all the way up, is just listening to this pickup. When it's thrown all the way down, it's just using this pickup. And when it's in the middle position, it's using both pickups. So let's show you how those sound. First of all, the front pickup, that's the warmer, strummier pickup, gets that sound. The back, you can hear that difference real quickly. This is a more trebly, biting sound. This is a more warmer, buttery sound. I like this for strumming, I like this for leads. And in the middle, you get sort of a little bit of both of those qualities. In all honesty, I don't use the middle position very much at all. I like to make a decision. Am I looking for this sound or am I looking for this sound? So we've got four knobs. The front two knobs are strictly volume knobs for the two pickups. This knob corresponds with the front pickup. This knob corresponds with the back pickup. So we can make some decisions. First of all, you might just want to turn them both all the way up and use your guitar volumes all the way up. And then when you make your decision between the pickups, that will strictly be done by the switch on the guitar. If I set the front pickup's volume a little bit lower, it'll be something like that. And then when I'm ready to play the lead, I throw that switch. And then all of a sudden, it pops right out. And that's a great way to use those volume knobs to your advantage. Now let's take a look at the tone knobs and how they work. Now a tone control on a guitar is essentially a low pass filter. So what that means is this, when that knob is turned all the way up, and I have these both turned all the way up, it's essentially letting all of the frequencies of that pickup through to the amplifier. So if I play my guitar with the low pass filter all the way up, we're hearing a broad spectrum of frequencies. If I turn that knob down a lot, we just hear the lower frequencies. You hear how those trebly sounds are gone. Turn it back up. We hear a lot broader range of frequencies. Now in all honesty, I turn those knobs all the way up and I let the sound of the guitar and the pickup come through all the time. Let's do the same thing with the back pickup, the lead pickup. Switch. Now I turn the low pass filter. A lot of the high frequencies are gone. Back up. The high frequencies are back in. So my recommendation to start is this. Use the tone knobs turned all the way up so that they're passing all of the frequencies through your guitar. I recommend that you adjust tone at the amplifier. Your volume knobs either turn them both all the way up on the guitar and essentially use them as on-off switches, which is what I do when I'm playing. If I want the sound, I have it as an on-off switch. If I turn it all the way down, nothing comes through. So now I know when it's all the way up, it's at the volume for me. Or adjust your front pickup to be a little quieter and your back pickup to be a little louder so that there's a difference. And when you throw that switch, you're getting a change in volume as well as a change in tone.