What the sam hell is all the electronic stuff?

Ok, so I'm wanting to start getting intimate with electronics in the guitar. I've got a guitar (my warlock) that's been dubbed a guinnea pig for my fixing up and if that fails I've got my squier. Only thing is I'm looking at a pdf file as I'm typing this and it's got wires going from this thing to that and from here to there and it makes no sense to me whatsoever. Pots, pickups, wires, all of it. Anyone got an explanation? Or at least a link to a site that can clear this crap up.

I posted a lesson on guitar set up (in the studio section). There is a book by recommended at the bottom of the page available from Stew Mac.

Also the StewMac "How to wire a...." videos are good to .

As far as guitar electronics go... you must first understand electronics. You need to develope a basic understanding of how it works (current, voltage, resistance, grounding, etc...). Once you get an understanding of all the basics you can apply it to guitar electronics. The best book I can recommend is available on stew-mac.com. Any book on there should be able to help you out. To halfway explain your question though... pots (potentiometers) are the knobs... they increase and decrease the amount of current that flows through them. Depending on whether you wire it as a volume pot or a tone pot pots can do different things. Tone pots bleed of different frequencies to alter the sound of the guitar. To get higher frequencies you use less resistance... leaving the guitar with a treble type sound... for bass tones you bleed as more treble by resisting the current... this is how you get warm tones. Capacitors are what bleeds off treble in guitar set-ups... different value of capacitors bleed off more or less treble. A volume pot simply restricts the entire current of the guitar without altering the tone. The grounding is done to complete the circuit. If you didn't ground the guitar it would shock you or anything that touched it (electricity is always trying to find the shortest path to the ground). That's why you provide the guitar with this path by grounding it to itself. This keeps the current from flowing through your body. If you get more in depth with electronics you will learn about passive and active pickup systems... series/parallel wiring... and in-phase and out-of-phase wiring... also some other custom wiring tricks that you can do with switches and knobs. Good luck, and check out a book it will help you out alot

Hey thanks to the both of you. Makes more sense now... sort of anyway. Anywho, I'll give the site and your lessons both a looksee.