gtr
Rookie Solder Flinger
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Post by gtr on Aug 13, 2006 14:25:37 GMT -5
Hi, I'm new to the forum. Been tinkering with guitars for years, though I'm no expert and often run into trouble with my experiments.
Currently I'm putting together a guitar and am experimenting with pickup wiring combinations. One thing that I thought was an interesting idea has turned out to surpass my ability to make it work. I wanted to have a configuration where I had the neck and bridge pickups on, but be able to cut the treble on the neck pickup while not affecting the bridge pickup. These are single-coil pickups on a mostly standard stratocaster setup. Is there a way to do this? Unless I missed something obvious, it seems to me that I'd have to control the flow of the circuitry with a diode or a polarized capacitor, but I'm in over my head. I wanted to write here and see if I should just abandon the idea before I start working on it. :~) Thanks for any help.
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Post by christopherhopkins on Aug 14, 2006 3:05:12 GMT -5
Hi,
What kinda switch are you using? If you're using a standard strat setup with a proper 2 pole 5 way then you can have seperate tone controls for the bridge and neck.
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Post by UnklMickey on Aug 14, 2006 11:05:51 GMT -5
hi Gtr,
welcome to GuitarNuts2.
skip any thoughts of using diodes or polarized capacitors.
they won't solve your problem, and in addition will just make things sound bad!
the difficulty you are running into comes from the parallel wiring.
that means, when your bridge and neck pickups are both on, the typical treble-cut tone circuit can't be connected to one, without being connected directly to the other.
possible solutions?:
1 -- de-couple your pickups from one another by use of series resistors.
2 -- wire your neck and bridge pickups in series and us a typical treble cut ciruit across only the neck pickup.
3 -- use an inductor in series with your neck pickup (and a pot in parallel with the inductor) to serve as your neck tone control.
solutions #1 and #2 have some STRONG effects on the basic tone. you might not find them usable at all.
unk
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Post by sumgai on Aug 14, 2006 16:28:33 GMT -5
gtr, Hi, and to the forums! A quick look at how a Les Paul performs will tell you all you need to know about how tone controls interact with each other, and how they affect the overall signal. If you select both pickups, and set one tone to full on, and the other tone to full off, what do you hear? That's correct, you hear no treble whatsoever, no matter which pickup's tone you left turned up. This suggests to us that even Gibson did not wish to invest the time to solve the problem, which in turn tells us that the solution won't be trivial. What unklmickey said above goes, but I'd add one more candidate to the list: a pair of very small amplfiers will also give you isolation, just as the resistors did in #1 of unk's list. Obviously, they won't kill the signal, so if you're up for packing a battery (or supplying phantom power from elsewhere), then this mght be what you're looking for in terms of completely separate tone controls. sumgai
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gtr
Rookie Solder Flinger
Posts: 3
Likes: 0
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Post by gtr on Aug 17, 2006 14:30:34 GMT -5
Hi everyone. Thanks for the replies. I'm in over my head (it's simple in concept though isn't it...), but I'm willing to give it a try. I have no basic knowledge of electronics so hang in there with me if I sound hopelessly ignorant.
I'm not sure how I wire the pickups in series- my only reference here is how humbuckers work and I'm not sure if that's what you're getting at. The only info I found on inductors was how to use them to cut mids instead of highs- that looks to be a steep learning curve for me- maybe you can point me to some references?
I think I understand the small amplifiers idea, but in practice isn't that just a way of putting direction to the signal? That's what I keep coming back to in my head- that these pickups are going to meet at some stage, and one cannot feed back into the other's wiring.
Anyway, even if you don't have time to give me a crash course in guitar electronics, hopefully you know some resources online I can check out. Thanks very much.
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