Post by ashcatlt on Aug 31, 2010 17:51:53 GMT -5
Okay, I'm not really looking for a specific fix here, but it's an issue that I recently encountered, have never seen discussed, and thought I bring up. Bear with me through the long setup.
So, with Circadian Nations, I play a fairly stripped down setup. Usually just my Strat with the middle pickup in series HB mode wide open into an AC30 model (Behringer Bass V-amp). Between the two I have a Boss HyperFuzz set to the "Clean Boost" setting with just a little extra gain, and a little bit of the treble rolled back. I stomp on it to push the "amp" further into overdrive for certain lead things and rare occasions when I need the extra crunch.
Now, I've finally got my Rick back up and running, and I'm wanting to play it for a "Big Show" we've got coming in September, so I've been bringing it to our regular Monday night gigs. A couple weeks ago, I ended up not having my pedals with me (that's a different long story, we'll leave it for later). Luckily, I found that flipping my Mode switch from the Parallel to the Series setting, with all the V's and T's all the way up did very much the same thing that I use my pedal for. It gets just louder enough, and a little bit darker. Great.
So, the next week I was messing around and decided that the Series tone was coming through a little darker than I wanted. Might have been a monitoring issue, but that's besides the point. It's easily solved, I thought. Just turn down the Neck Tone control to allow some of the treble from the Bridge pickup to bypass around the Neck pickup. Sounded better, though we still had some monitor issues.
But then I went and switched it back to Parallel mode and guess what I got. MUD! This is to be expected I suppose. In Parallel mode each T basically acts as a master, and I had one of them turned all the way down. So, to get from the Half-Series tone to a wide open Parallel tone requires twisting two knobs. I have plenty of other things to do with my hands in the middle of a song. Less now, though, since WI went smoke-free.
Anyway, I can fix this problem by not forgetting my pedals, but we recommend this kind of thing to others as an interesting modification without ever mentioning this caveat. In an S/P arrangement with individual Tone controls, the Tone control's action changes completely when you flip the S/P switch. It actually has the complete opposite action.
A "normal" S/P switch is usually a DPDT. If we were to use a 4PDT in it's place, we could "flip" the Tone control around as we switch from Series to Parallel, so that 10 would always be the brightest, with 0 as the darkest. This, though, makes it impossible to use a P/P pot, which is a common place to put the S/P switch.
Again, I'm not looking for a fix for my Rick. Anybody want to discuss fixes for this issue in the context of more common Series/Parallel arrangements?
So, with Circadian Nations, I play a fairly stripped down setup. Usually just my Strat with the middle pickup in series HB mode wide open into an AC30 model (Behringer Bass V-amp). Between the two I have a Boss HyperFuzz set to the "Clean Boost" setting with just a little extra gain, and a little bit of the treble rolled back. I stomp on it to push the "amp" further into overdrive for certain lead things and rare occasions when I need the extra crunch.
Now, I've finally got my Rick back up and running, and I'm wanting to play it for a "Big Show" we've got coming in September, so I've been bringing it to our regular Monday night gigs. A couple weeks ago, I ended up not having my pedals with me (that's a different long story, we'll leave it for later). Luckily, I found that flipping my Mode switch from the Parallel to the Series setting, with all the V's and T's all the way up did very much the same thing that I use my pedal for. It gets just louder enough, and a little bit darker. Great.
So, the next week I was messing around and decided that the Series tone was coming through a little darker than I wanted. Might have been a monitoring issue, but that's besides the point. It's easily solved, I thought. Just turn down the Neck Tone control to allow some of the treble from the Bridge pickup to bypass around the Neck pickup. Sounded better, though we still had some monitor issues.
But then I went and switched it back to Parallel mode and guess what I got. MUD! This is to be expected I suppose. In Parallel mode each T basically acts as a master, and I had one of them turned all the way down. So, to get from the Half-Series tone to a wide open Parallel tone requires twisting two knobs. I have plenty of other things to do with my hands in the middle of a song. Less now, though, since WI went smoke-free.
Anyway, I can fix this problem by not forgetting my pedals, but we recommend this kind of thing to others as an interesting modification without ever mentioning this caveat. In an S/P arrangement with individual Tone controls, the Tone control's action changes completely when you flip the S/P switch. It actually has the complete opposite action.
A "normal" S/P switch is usually a DPDT. If we were to use a 4PDT in it's place, we could "flip" the Tone control around as we switch from Series to Parallel, so that 10 would always be the brightest, with 0 as the darkest. This, though, makes it impossible to use a P/P pot, which is a common place to put the S/P switch.
Again, I'm not looking for a fix for my Rick. Anybody want to discuss fixes for this issue in the context of more common Series/Parallel arrangements?