State of Epicicity
Fractal Fanatic
EDIT: Read post 57
This has changed everything for me.
I've been intrigued by the idea of integrating trimpots to my guitar to fine tune my pickups' response. Wiring a resistor to the outer lugs of your volume pot will lower the resonant frequency, essentially changing the fundamental tone of your pickup, as if you had just swapped your pickup for another one entirely; yes, it's the same construction, magnet, wire, and design, but it's a drastic change.
So I thought, rather than a fixed resistor that you'd have to swap out just to try a different value, couldn't you just use a variable resistor, a pot, to get it just where you wanted? And that's what a trimpot is, a tiny, easily installable variable resistor. So tonight I wired in a 500k trimpot to the outer lugs of the volume pot of each pickup (connecting lug 3 of the volume pot to lug 3 of the trimpot, and lug 1 of the volume pot to lug 2 of the trimpot), with long wires so they'd dangle from the pickguard.
As I was playing, I just adjusted the trimpots until the pickups were "tuned" perfectly to the guitar. I could hear the pick attack change as I was doing it, with volume and tone pots on 10, and you could just feel in the guitar go in and out of a sweet spot for each pickup.
This is my Sun Valley Super Shredder Black Limba that I'm doing this on, a very very bright guitar, and I had just reinstalled my favorite pickups, the Duncan Saturday Night Specials, which are also bright. Why do that? To me these pickups are just very nuanced and expressive, just what I want; the only caveat is that they're really designed for Les Pauls, which are so much darker than my guitar.
So tonight I installed an A500k / A500k dual concentric for volume and tone on the neck, and an A250K / A250K dual concentric for the bridge. With the trimpots, the guitar went from unbearably bright to perfectly balanced. I wanted my superstrat basically to sound like the most ideal Les Paul, and to my ears, this completely did it. I used 50s wiring for each pickup, with a 3-way blade switch pickup selector, with a .015 cap for the neck tone and .010 on the bridge. Now it's versatile, beautiful sounding, and tonally balanced. Now that I've fine tuned the pickups, I'll install the trimpots under the pickguard tomorrow.
Pure joy!
This has changed everything for me.
I've been intrigued by the idea of integrating trimpots to my guitar to fine tune my pickups' response. Wiring a resistor to the outer lugs of your volume pot will lower the resonant frequency, essentially changing the fundamental tone of your pickup, as if you had just swapped your pickup for another one entirely; yes, it's the same construction, magnet, wire, and design, but it's a drastic change.
So I thought, rather than a fixed resistor that you'd have to swap out just to try a different value, couldn't you just use a variable resistor, a pot, to get it just where you wanted? And that's what a trimpot is, a tiny, easily installable variable resistor. So tonight I wired in a 500k trimpot to the outer lugs of the volume pot of each pickup (connecting lug 3 of the volume pot to lug 3 of the trimpot, and lug 1 of the volume pot to lug 2 of the trimpot), with long wires so they'd dangle from the pickguard.
As I was playing, I just adjusted the trimpots until the pickups were "tuned" perfectly to the guitar. I could hear the pick attack change as I was doing it, with volume and tone pots on 10, and you could just feel in the guitar go in and out of a sweet spot for each pickup.
This is my Sun Valley Super Shredder Black Limba that I'm doing this on, a very very bright guitar, and I had just reinstalled my favorite pickups, the Duncan Saturday Night Specials, which are also bright. Why do that? To me these pickups are just very nuanced and expressive, just what I want; the only caveat is that they're really designed for Les Pauls, which are so much darker than my guitar.
So tonight I installed an A500k / A500k dual concentric for volume and tone on the neck, and an A250K / A250K dual concentric for the bridge. With the trimpots, the guitar went from unbearably bright to perfectly balanced. I wanted my superstrat basically to sound like the most ideal Les Paul, and to my ears, this completely did it. I used 50s wiring for each pickup, with a 3-way blade switch pickup selector, with a .015 cap for the neck tone and .010 on the bridge. Now it's versatile, beautiful sounding, and tonally balanced. Now that I've fine tuned the pickups, I'll install the trimpots under the pickguard tomorrow.
Pure joy!
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