Tips to nudge Seth Lover towards single coil vibe?

[alex1fly]

So I'm rewiring my SG to get the PCB outta there and try some non stock pickups. The neck pickup I had in mind is a P90 with a modified baseplate so it'll fit. Unfortunately, there are issues with the pickup, so I'm looking around my parts drawer for temporary solutions. One option is a Seth Lover, but I'm pulling out 57 Classics that are also Alnico 2 and entirely too woody and warm and muddy in a mix so I'm nervous about trying a similar pup. I was also really hoping to experiment with a single coil kind of vibe in the neck position - can a mag swap push the Lover towards a single coil like response? Chimey, detailed treble, clarity under higher gain, responsive.

I've read some of the old threads and there are great stories. Alnico 3, 4, & 5 are mentioned, as is lowering the pickup significantly and raising the polepieces to match volume. So is the de-mud mod. Any other ideas? I'd love to try something while I have the guitar disassembled.

[Mincer]

A Seth is slightly honky too, not woody and warm like an Alnico II Pro. It is EQd like a scooped PAF but with those honky mids.

[Clint 55]

Yes, I've mag swapped the Seth and going to an A3, UOA5, A5, or A6 will make it more chimey and single coil-y. So does removing the cover. You could also spin a split it since you have 4 knobs, that would be icing on the cake.

[eclecticsynergy]

Part of the problem is that SGs tend to have a midrangey natural character to start with, thanks to their thin mahogany body.
Not necessarily a bad thing in guitar tone, but it's difficult to get rid of something that's pretty much intrinsic to the design.

A3 would move your Seth in a slightly chimier vintagey direction but it would still have a fair amount of that honk.

I'd say A5 is your best bet in a straight swap. It has a reputation as the most scooped of the alnico family, but IMO it doesn't really have weak mids - it just has extra treble & strong bass that sort of mask the mids. And it's stronger compared to A2.

Raising the pole screws and lowering the coils is a valid idea, worth experimenting with.

Now, if you wanted to get radical, you could put in a double thick ceramic and remove the pole screws completely.
That would give you a single working coil but retain the hum rejection.
However, it would be one very weak coil - around 4K - and might be thin sounding to the point of uselessness, even charged with ceramic.

Another surgical option would be to replace the wire with a 4-wire lead.
Then you could do partial coil split with a resistor or even a trimpot to let you dial it down to your taste.

Perhaps simpler just to buy a humbucker-sized P90 of some sort, or a nice bright-voiced hum like the Jazz Neck.

If you aren't concerned with traditional looks, for a few bucks you can get an adaptor plate to mount a Strat pickup in a humbucker cutout.



There are also boutique builders (including the Duncan Custom Shop, I think) who can put a Strat pickup under a humbucker cover.

[beaubrummels]

Something I tried recently (not on Seths, but humbuckers in general) to make them more single-coil like, was a fixed Varitone (small 1.5h choke and resistor/cap network) to scoop the sound. I also experimented with using the coils of the other pickup that is not producing sound as the choke. Basically I had the fixed Varitone on the part of the switch that split the coils, so it only affected the humbucker when split to single. But it could be used all the time to make a humbucker more single-like, but at that point, I would just use a different pickup in the first place.

[freefrog]

So I'm rewiring my SG to get the PCB outta there and try some non stock pickups. The neck pickup I had in mind is a P90 with a modified baseplate so it'll fit. Unfortunately, there are issues with the pickup, so I'm looking around my parts drawer for temporary solutions. One option is a Seth Lover, but I'm pulling out 57 Classics that are also Alnico 2 and entirely too woody and warm and muddy in a mix so I'm nervous about trying a similar pup. I was also really hoping to experiment with a single coil kind of vibe in the neck position - can a mag swap push the Lover towards a single coil like response? Chimey, detailed treble, clarity under higher gain, responsive.

I've read some of the old threads and there are great stories. Alnico 3, 4, & 5 are mentioned, as is lowering the pickup significantly and raising the polepieces to match volume. So is the de-mud mod. Any other ideas? I'd love to try something while I have the guitar disassembled.

The Seth Lover being among my favorite Duncan's, I've never much modded it but on the basis of my subjective experience (and to evoke things not mentioned above without discarding previous answers)...

1) A Seth in a SG = great tones;

2)I'd expect a Seth to sound tighter than a Gibson P.A.F. clone (Gibson magnets being often overgaussed, according to our lab teslameter: it's not the case with AlNiCo bars in Duncan's);

3)I'd expect a Seth to sound like a Seth whatever is the magnet in it. I've built an hybrid once with all the parts of a T-Top + SH55 coil and it still sounded honky like a Seth...

4)The demud mod is an absolutely brilliant idea. That said, any circuit involving a series capacitor has a conflictual relationship with some effects, like fuzz pedals;

5)To obtain a convincing single coil tone from a low DCR/low inductance P.A.F. clone, the best trick that I've found personally is to wire it in parallel with a custom LR filter, specifically built / designed for that. A 5 Henry inductor in series with a 24k resistor should do the job (and one can build a poor man's LR filter with a cheapo humbucker deprived of its baseplate + magnet then wired in series with a resistor of the "proper" value).

YMMV. IOW, your experience & favorite solutions might differ from mine "and it's totally fine", to quote Leo Gibson on YT. Good luck in your experiments. :-)

[beaubrummels]

Oooh, that might be it. I might have misspoke. I think I did use a choke and a resistor, no cap. I was looking at an electronics manual while I did it, so I didn't really memorize the circuit. I was just trying things to see what they did. I didn't wire the hum in parallel, however. Now i have to try that.

[GuitarStv]

If you take the screws out of the screw coil of a humbucker, you get a slightly weaker/brighter sound that's maybe kinda similar to a single coil pickup. It'll still be hum cancelling, and best of all it's free and easy to undo if you don't like it.