Late in 1995 I
purchased my first electric guitar (except for a brief fling at 13), a Korean Squier Stratocaster that was unbelievably noisy. When I looked
"under the hood" I was appalled to find an unshielded mess of ground loops. Having many years experience
as an electronics technician I was flabbergasted that even an inexpensive guitar would be so poorly wired.
You can imagine my disgust when I discovered that even many "high-end" guitars costing hundreds or even thousands
of dollars were wired no better than that cheap Squier. Naturally I shielded and wired that Strat
properly and it became so quiet that I could play it in front of my computer monitor at reasonably high gain
without a lot of noise. After hearing horror stories of people being told by their local dealers that
guitars equipped with single-coil pickups were supposed to hum, that it was "part of the Fender sound," I
became disgusted enough to put instructions for wiring and shielding guitars up on my personal web site.
The response was overwhelming and soon I was exceeding the amount of traffic permitted by the ISP I was using
so I purchased a domain and began paying to have the account hosted by a commercial web hosting company.
From those humble beginnings GuitarNuts has steadily grown as I am able to add new features to the site.
It is no longer just a wiring site, we now have other sections including a public forum.
I've never really promoted the site, have never even submitted it to a search engine, but after Guitar Player
magazine featured the site traffic snowballed so rapidly that I had to kick my commercial
account up a level because I was again reaching the point where my bandwidth was being throttled before the
end of the month.
As for day-to-day operations, GuitarNuts remains mostly a one-man effort. However, I now have a number
of people I trust to perform gear reviews and to whom I turn for advice in areas outside my field of expertise.
Volunteers also contribute greatly to the site, from sending schematics of their favorite modifications to John
Thornburgh's fine article on potting pickups to photographs of a shielding project in progress.
If you have something you would like to contribute, I gladly welcome all such input. Just please
understand that it may take some time before your submissions actually show up on the site because, when
it comes to answering e-mail and updating the site, this is still pretty much a one-man operation, and
that one man has to work for a living just like y'all!
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