Fattening Your Tone

[minions]

I have an Epiphone Les Paul Special II that is a thin body knock-off of a Gibson Les Paul. It doesn't have a carved top and instead of being made of mahogany, it is made of alder (or maybe basswood, I'm not entirely sure) which we all know is a brighter sounding wood. I like the tone already but I want to make some modifications. I know of course that it will never sound quite like a real Les Paul but I just want to fatten the tone. Any suggestions?

[dunkelfalke]

Basically you need to boost the mids. This can be achieved with many different ways: another pickup, active electronics, equalizer stompbox...

[gitpiddler]

I just got thru massaging one of those for a friend. I found a misplaced shim under the neck. Make sure the neck is sitting in the pocket square and tight. That alone fattened the tone so much I had to back off the pickup adjustments. I prefer them direct mounted myself. Plus on this instrument, they are mounted too far towards the treble side. They both almost miss the high E completely.

[ashcatlt]

You could try some Pickup Coil Response Tuning.

Edit - unfortunately, the pics on that link went broken when we pd off ChrisK, but I think the info's still good.

[newey]

As has been said here before, a straight-up pickup upgrade is usually the best single thing you can do to improve an economy models' tone. Hey, to hit the price point, Epiphone has to cut many things, and cheaper pickups are part of the plan.

I have a set of Epi LP pickups on my Electric Pumpkin. I would rate them as "OK, nothing special". They're slated for replacement as the first order of business, if I ever get the gumption to pull it apart again.

[betweenthees]

hello, not sure if this would help what your looking for, but what would changing the size of the capacitor on the tone pot do?

[newey]

E 2 E-

Hello and Welcome!

Changing the cap will only change things as the tone knob is rotated, not if it's at "10".

Ash's link above to ChrisK's Pickup Coil Response Tuning thread deals with putting a cap in the circuit to alter overall coil response, not on a tone pot.

Minions hasn't told us what the values of the pots are in this guitar, they're probably 500K, but 300K were also used by Gibby/Epi. Whether changing to a lower-resistance pot would "fatten" the tone, as opposed to "muddying" it, is a matter for one's particular set of ears, I suspect.

[betweenthees]

I have heard of wiring a capacitor in paralell (between the volume and pickup, or volume and output dont know wich, or as a bypass of the volume pot?) to preseve highs when turning the volume pot down. Is it similar to that concept?

Take that with a shaker of salt, lot of question marks in my head when i was writing it.

[newey]

I have heard of wiring a capacitor in paralell (between the volume and pickup, or volume and output dont know wich, or as a bypass of the volume pot?) to preseve highs when turning the volume pot down. Is it similar to that concept?

ChrisK's post is now less than useful since the graphics are gone. The basic take-away was that capacitors in parallel could be used to "fine tune" the frequency response of a given pickup coil. Chris used a variable capacitance device to ascertain the "best fit" cap value for a particular pickup; a capacitor substitution box would do the same thing.

The caps are in parallel with the pickup coil. Since the volume pot is likewise in parallel with the coil, I believe it could be placed before or after the pot, shouldn't matter.

The (now missing) graphs showed that this is not a simple thing, electrically- and my explanation probably grossly oversimplifies it.

As far as preserving treble while the volume pot is being turned down, you may be referring to the use of a cap and a resistor (called an RC filter) across the volume pot to maintain treble response as the volume is reduced. JohnH is a big advocate of that, and I've used that as well, it's a good idea. But it's not really what was going on in the pickup coil response tuning thread.

[betweenthees]

Good stuff! Thanks for taking the time to catch me up here-



Would this be the super simplification of what were talking about?
edit:: ignore where it says "rest of internals" meant to put that elseware...




dont bother correcting this too much because im getting off topic, but is either of these the general look of the RC filter?

[newey]

E 2 E-

your diagram#1 is the RC filter, #2 has the resistor and cap in series. JohnH recommends using a 220KΩ resistor and a 1nf (.001µf) capacitor.

And yes, the first diagram is the general idea of the coil response thing, the trick is finding the correct value for the cap for any particular application.