New guitar is somewhat bright. Thinking of purchasing a darker pickup.

[alex1fly]

Skip to the last paragraph if you're not interested in reading a big ol' wall of text about improving your playing.

I've been in the guitar modding community for a little over five years. If there's one distilled piece of wisdom I've learned in that time that I could dispense to you it is this:

You will never learn how to sculpt your tone with your fingers if you only ever replace problem parts.

Before you yank out the pickup, do some experimenting with your pick attack. Pay close attention to the nuance of your stroke. How steep is your picking angle? Do you drag your pick or does your wrist flick about halfway through? Is the plane of the pick perpendicular or twisted relative to the strings? What location do you pick over? Then experiment with changing these variables. It may sound dumb at first, because after all, if you get shirt tailored and the sleeves are too long, the tailor doesn't tell you "you'll get used to it", but after a while you gain the ability to change your done from bright and twangy to thick and powerful with little more than your hands.


Buy a 250k and 100k tone control pot. Replace the tone control with the 250k, and if that's still to bright try the 100k. It's a lot cheaper to buy a pot than a pickup if all you're trying to do is dampen some highs.

Amen. Different pick thicknesses have different tones for me, as well. Fingerstyle is a darker sound.

OP: I get it. My all mahogany SG is bright acoustically, but dark amplified - has just enough high end with my treble EQs maxed out. It has 57 Classics in it, which are Alnico 2 PAFs.

[Chistopher]

It's called a low pass filter, by the way, because low(er) frequencies pass through to the desired destination, while high(er) frequencies don't. In our case they get dumped to ground through the cap.

If you get into the Laplace transforms and transfer functions you can calculate which frequencies will and will not pass through the filter. Me? It's been 35 years since I last used a Laplace transform, and I'm not about to start again now.

I have this program at work that you plug in what you want from it, and it'll give you any type of pass/block filter up to the 20th order that can be exported to whatever file type you want. Definitely a lot easier and quicker than doing it by hand

[ThreeChordWonder]

I have this program at work that you plug in what you want from it, and it'll give you any type of pass/block filter up to the 20th order that can be exported to whatever file type you want. Definitely a lot easier and quicker than doing it by hand

Cool. What's it called?

[Chistopher]

ADI Precision Studio, there's a free web-based version of it on tools.analog.com, but they used to have a whole software package you could get. I don't see it on the site right now though, maybe call them if you want it.

[Juanhanglo]

sometimes. It's a les paul, why not put a 250k volume and/or tone pot on the bridge side electronics?

[Demanic]

Stainless frets definitely make a guitar brighter. So do new strings. I second trying 250k pots first before you change the pickup.

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