H-S-S pickup wiring mods to darken tone?

[guido]

Hello all

I have an Epiphone (not sure what model, but it is sort of a strat-copy, made mid-late nineties, probably at the Samick factory, with H-S-S pickup configuration, a five-way switch, and cheap six-screw tremolo) that I'd like to alter the overall tone. I am happy with the timbre of the pickups but the tone is bright enough to just about fry the fillings in my teeth.

I would like to perform some mild mods in order to "darken" the overall tone. Any suggestions (aside from actually replacing the pups) you might have will be MUCH appreciated.

Thanks to all!

[UnklMickey]

hi Guido,

on behalf of our administrator - RandomHero, and all the nuts i'd like to say welcome aboard and "did you ever come to the right place!"

we like mild (and not so mild) mods here.

i'll start by throwing a few thoughts out there.

make sure it's the guitar and not the amp that is "frying your fillings". if you own other guitars that you like and they sound fine with that amp, then okay, time to mod. or if you've played this guitar through a few different amps with the same overly bright results, also indicates time to mod.

so lets start simple.

• adjust the height of your pickups -- closer to the strings = louder & darker
  
  
• experiment with electrically loading your pickups -- bypass (short) the cap in your tone circuit and use the tone control as an adjustable load. as you rotate it ccw, the sound will slowly get quieter, but more quickly it will get darker. if you like the sound at a particular setting of the pot with a particular pickup, measure the resistance of the pot at that setting and install a fixed resistor of that value in parallel with the pickup.
  
  
• re-configure the tone switching -- the standard controls on a strat are volume, neck tone, and middle tone. (is the epiphone the same?) -- maybe you'd prefer neck tone and bridge tone? or middle tone and bridge tone? or master tone and bridge tone?
  

well that's a few of the real easy ones, but the guys on this forum are very inventive. give them a better description of what you want and don't want, and what your skills are, and they may even have something already drawn up that fits the bill.

if your interested in some more elaborate mods, see the original guitarnuts.com and the tonemonster thread on this forum as well as the rest of the threads in the E & W section.

no matter how much you already know, you can get lots of different ideas from all sides here. just pick and choose what fits you best. or combine your favorite from column A with your favorite from column B.


good luck

U.M.

[RandomHero]

Hey, I second UM, welcome!

There are some components you can replace that will change your tone, and they're all fairly simple. You should check first to see if your volume and tone pots are 500k or 250k; if they're five hundred, they're keeping a lot of the original signal in the treble end. 250k will make the ear-bleeding lessen significantly.

The simplest mod you could do is replace the tone caps. The higher the value of your tone caps, the darker the tonality of your pickups will be, as higher-value caps allow more treble frequencies to bleed off to ground. You can go buy a handful of different values from a good electronics store for cents apiece, then tack-solder each one in succession to find your own "sweet spot." For better detail, check out the mod on guitarnuts2.proboards.com/page/gn1-pages called "Shift Your Tone Control's Range."

Tell us what you decide to do. =)