Your electric guitar is only one-half of an instrument. This may seem obvious, what good is an electric guitar without something to amplify it? However, the importance of the amplifier is so often overlooked, especially by beginners. It is not an exaggeration to say that a good amp can make a lousy guitar better, while a bad amp will make the best guitar sound lousy.

Before you spend big dollars to replace pickups, or to buy a better axe, or to collect stomp boxes -- spend the money on a good amplifier. Good doesn't have to mean large and powerful -- I have a little 15 watt class A tube amp with tremelo, spring reverb, and a 12" speaker that sounds absolutely wonderful. Avoid the cheap "practice" amps like the plague. I have never heard any combination of guitar and pedals sound really good through one of these. I wish I had a dollar for every person who has spent a fortune on pickups, stomp boxes, and ever more expensive axes in search of "tone" while they were still using a cheap amp!

Okay, now that we have the "amp snobbery" out of the way -- let's look at the more subtle ways your guitar and amp interract to make the complete instrument. The pickups and tone control circuit in your guitar do not stand alone, they interact with the first gain stage in your rig. This gain stage is either the preamp of the amplifier or the gain stage in a stomp box. The guitar and the first gain stage make up a complete circuit that, more than any other part of your rig, determines what native tone is available for amplification, distortion, effects, and so on. If you lose much of the native tone of your guitar that native tone is gone forever -- you can use various effects to try to put some interest back in the sound, but the native tones of the guitar are gone for good.

Every amplifying device has an input impedance. Furthermore, every amplifying device has a frequency response curve that may, or may not, be narrower than the output range from your guitar. Finally, amplifying devices have varying sensitivity to impedance and signal amplititude. Some are very tolerant, others less so. What does all this mean? Simply that changing the configuration of your guitar (selecting different pickups or different wiring for the pickups, for example) may make a huge difference in tone and/or volume when you are plugged into one device -- but the same change may make little noticeable difference when plugged into another. What am I saying? Experiment! -- if not for those who've been willing to push the boundaries we'd still be making music by beating two rocks together.

• For example, changing from parallel to series pickup wiring may make a huge difference when you are plugged straight into a tube amp but very little difference when you are running through a stomp box first.