Founder & Owner of MGB Guitars & Parts Supplier Michael Breedlove discusses our new MGB Hot Tuna guitar pickups!
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Video Transcript
What's a hot tuna let's talk about it! At MGB guitars we have a lot of pickups we have a nice line of pickups my partner's Josh, Derek, and I are always listening to the marketplace talking to builders seeing what's going on and we kind of find that we really have some areas of product line that are really critical we sell a lot of tuners we sell a lot of pickups we sell a lot of neck components and next those are some really important areas so we have a lot of pickups in our line and we're gonna add a few more and I'm going to talk a little bit about what we're calling the hot tuna now that's a crazy name but so is $ and so it's and it's kind of interesting that we make a name that's unusual and it seems to stick as a matter of fact we haven't even we just recently introduced the hot tuna and there's a few guys that are building with it and everybody's already talking about the hot tuna so what is this thing we call the hot tuna it's a mini humbucker pretty straightforward it's just a humbucker but it's small and scale and small insides seems to work out perfect for a lot of cigar box guitars and it looks really cool give you a little bit of an idea about it it basically comes in three colors at the point at this point there's chrome gold and black it's again a humbucker but it is a split coil the wiring here is a little bit different than some of the wiring you'll see on some of our other pickups I'll go through it really quickly if you look at the back you'll see three separate bundles of wires and again because it's a humbucker we know that there are actually two cores of wire inside there and they are connected so on this contrary to what you might see on the other ones just looking at the wire the black is the hot and then you will see a braided wire and the green that's the ground and then you'll see a white in a red that are hooked together and that's the wires between the two coils and that could be disregarded from most setups unless you want to use them as clique coils then you would know what to do with this but again what you're looking to do is you're looking to hook up with the black and the green braids those are your two wires that you want to hook use to connect with these pickups one of the questions I always get asked about every pickup and we put a lot of information out there is they mask how it measures what's the rating and I've got one plugged in here and for those of you that want to know and are gonna ask that questions it's running about seven point five nine now people tend to talk about the kilohm rating and they talk about a hot pickup and they think that a higher the number the hotter the pickup and they think that's better performance maybe it's louder or it's different that's not necessarily the case yes this is an indicator but all you're measuring here is the resistance of that coil of wire we talked a lot about in one of my other videos on on pickups we talked about the construction of pickups nothing more than a coil of wire in a magnet beyond that it gets a little bit more complicated but at the very basics it's a coil of wire and it's a magnet this measurement this measurement of kilohms is based upon a measuring of the resistance in that coil and that's a factor of two things the diameter of the wire and the amount of wire the smaller the diameter the smaller the larger the gauge number the smaller the diameter the higher the resistance and of course the more turns the higher the resistance and that's a factor that the guys who design develop and manufacture pickups keep in mind and it's some of the stuff we keep in mind is we're developing them while a lot of the pickups we have our pickups that are made by other people we have some that are developed to our to our own specifications the Hot Tuna was one of those all of the many box bunkers other pickups that we've come up with were ones that we specified the ratings the size the shape and so on and so again what I tell people is be careful don't get too hung up on the kilohm rating there's a lot of other factors in building a cigar box guitar they're going to have an impact on the sound the setup the box the construction the pots that you use the all those kinds of things the settings can make a whole different sounding guitar but again this is a new pickup that we've come up with we're really proud we hope you'll remember it ask for it by name it's called a Hot Tuna we hope you've enjoyed this video we hope you found it useful if you have any questions or comments make sure to let us know see you next time.
