... For the record, I get to be the one to officially say that there is no such thing as a passive EQ, because all passive electronics are subtractive, so you can't add anything. ...
Huh? now i'm confused. i thought that was the definition of passive EQ. no active components. hence a passive EQ would attenuate cetain frequencies more than others.
or am i missing something?
U.M.
Well, that definition is a cyclical conundrum. More on that in a moment. But specifically, what you might be missing is the fact that the purpose of an EQ is the ability to independently attenuate all frequencies across the board, and not just one specific band, and only in one specific direction.
An exception to this is the Variable 3-Band EQ that EMG has available, with which the bands can be customized on the fly, and have more scooping and contouring action, which provides an excellent EQ function, and ergo doesn't necessitate the need for 10-Band EQ, which I've actually seen installed on some guitars and basses. I think that's overkill.
The only way you can say there's no such thing as passive EQ is to make the terms passive and EQ mutually exclusive. A tone cap is a passive EQ. It only rolls off some treble, correct, but the final output has a different frequency range, right? More accurately you should say there's no such thing as a passive boost.
Understand, in both of these instances, as well as the intent of this thread, the term EQ is being used in it's absolute loosest sense.
And EQ has always classically connotated either boost and cut capabilities, not just cut. Ergo, we refer to a pot with a cap as a tone control, not an EQ.
I mean, really, what would we call that? A subtractive one-band EQ? That doesn't even show up on the radar as far as relevance goes in the world of engineering, at least not that I've ever seen.
When you talk EQ, most everyone operates from the place of boost or cut, not merely cut. And people usually don't concern themselves with such trivial semantics as "passive" vs. "active" as if that really bestowed legitimacy to the idea of calling a pot and a cap an EQ, anymore than misnaming a vibrato a "tremolo", or humbucker splitting "coil tapping".
Like most fandoms and, more apropos, geekdoms, we guitarists tend to live in a consensus reality where almost anything we make up goes, and, with enough dogmatic fortitude, is often eventually accepted as gospel truth.
In the most technical and accurate sense, at least denotatively and connotatively, there is no such thing as a passive EQ, just passive "tone controls". Yes, you are legitimately controlling the tone, however crudely, but you are not EQing in anything in terms of extra juice or any other form of preamping specific frequencies.
If a pot and a cap is an EQ, it must hold the record for the crudest and clumsiest EQ ever known to man, and hardly worthy, nor for that matter
noteworthy, of the distinction.
Incidently, by way of comparison, one of my favorite books is
Fretboard Logic SE, by Bill Edwards. Absolutely brilliant. It goes into the Chord Forms and Scale Forms that make up the "Operating System", if you will, of the guitar, and once you read it, you get the guitar in a totally new and profound way.
Well, the chord forms are named after the open positions that they are based on (with the addition of a barre finger) so that the open C major yields the C Form, open A major yields the A Form, and so on, for G, E, and D. (Incidentally, there is no "F Form", being that the popular version of F Major is a partial E Form, First Position; and there is no B Form, being that B Major is a full A Form, 2nd Position. Look at those chords on your guitar and you'll see what I mean.)
Well, the scale forms directly link up with those barre forms, and if you watch the evolution of the barre forms thru their arpeggio versions to a pentatonic version to a diatonic version, they clearly match up and interlock with each other the same way the chord forms interlock on the fretboard.
It's all pretty cut and dry in that regard.
So, that said, it was very interesting to check out a blues book, and a very comprehensive and well written one at that, and find the same distinctions laid out in some of the lessons on scale work. The chord forms were correctly named, and was an obvious reference to the CAGED Sequence, and probably drew from FBL SE, but the scale forms were all wrong. The author was one off in the sequence in naming the scale forms, so that the C Scale Form was incorrectly named the "A Scale Form", the A named the "G", the G named the "E", the E the "D", and the D the "C" form. There were even pages where he pictures the Chord Form and the Scale Form on the same page, and it is painfully obvious to anyone who knows FBL SE that the chord and scale forms don't even sync up. The notes don't even overlap as they should.
Well, I'm looking at these and I'm wondering how such a thoughtful and talented author could have made such a grievous error, and what was behind it. Was it an issue with copywrited material, or a matter of avoiding plagerism? Had he been teaching it incorrectly all these years?
Whatever the case, we guitarists, who tend to be DIYer's, usually commit two cardinal sins: 1) our egos assume we have it all worked out, 2) and we believe in whatever we arbitrarily make up as if it's gospel truth. A third one would be that we just assume some convention is accurate.
A vibrato is classically a flucuation in pitch; tremolo a flucuation in volume, such as with surf music, or the intro to The Smith's "How Soon Is Now?" Ergo, the pitch flucuating bridges we find on Strats and Strat-clones are called "tremolos".
A coil tap is when we tap a coil near the middle of it's total coil-length to create a different pickup timbre, usually a more brittle, glassy sound vs. the harder, beefier, edgier sound we get from the full coil; a coil split is when we use one coil of a humbucker, instead of both, to simulate the timbre of a single coil pickup, and to this end we usually don't tap any of the coils anywhere near the middle of them, but simply shunt one coil to ground, and pull from ground for the other coil. Ergo, when some newbie wants to know how to split the coils of his humbucker, he asks how he can best "tap" it. I'm willing to bet real money that no marketed pickup has been tapped going back some 30 years. Of course, all bets are off if Duncan has recently done something with their Antiquity series, which would only prove the point.
If you want to call your pot and cap an EQ because it sounds cooler, then fine, go for it, but I wouldn't use that languaging if you were trying to sell your guitar on eBay. As far as those variable passive tone controls on that website, well, if you like the sound they produce, cool, but, understand, if you max out all the settings, you might not have any tone left to control, since you will have cancelled out a lot of the frequencies.
Incidentally, I use the aforementioned 3-Band EQ (active, naturally) on both my guitar and my bass, and I wouldn't have it any other way. I can do everything with it a pot and a cap can do, and tons more.
Not only that, but the Bass control on the guitar gives the bottom end a presence that has to be heard and felt to be believed, and may well be the answer to the question so many of these kids have about how best increase the strength of their guitars, often searching for the right amp or pickups, or guitar for that matter.
Chesh
