Adding a capacitor to a coil split to reduce brightness?

[aviavi]

Hello. Does anyone know if it's possible to reduce the treble of the single coil sound of a split humbucker? My bridge humbucker is wired to split with a push/push tone pot. I would like to make it so that when using only one coil, the sound is less bright (via a capacitor, I guess) but bypasses this capacitor when going back to humbucker mode.

Thank you.

 

[Ed Hunter]

Re: Adding a capacitor to a coil split to reduce brightness?

use a 470k resistor is series with the hot wire of the coil that will be staying on when the push/pull is engaged:cool2:

 

[aviavi]

Re: Adding a capacitor to a coil split to reduce brightness?

Thanks much, but I'm not sure this would work with my setup, since there's only one hot wire, which is active in humbucker mode too. See my wiring (up position is coil split with white and black wires shorted to ground):

 

[ehdwuld]

Re: Adding a capacitor to a coil split to reduce brightness?

Thanks much, but I'm not sure this would work with my setup, since there's only one hot wire, which is active in humbucker mode too. See my wiring (up position is coil split with white and black wires shorted to ground):

Dimarzio?

can't you just roll the tone control?

 

[Ed Hunter]

Re: Adding a capacitor to a coil split to reduce brightness?

Dimarzio?

can't you just roll the tone control?

I agree if it is a dimarzio

 

[aviavi]

Re: Adding a capacitor to a coil split to reduce brightness?

Yes, I could just roll the tone control down, but I'd like to just have the rolled down tone be "permanent" or automatic, whenever I switch to single coil. Or I guess conversally, I'd like to bypass the tone control when in full humbucker mode.

 

[AlexR]

Re: Adding a capacitor to a coil split to reduce brightness?

Just wire the push-pull to be parallel instead of split. The tone is still single coil like, but its a bit fatter and less piercing.

 

[allstarrme]

Re: Adding a capacitor to a coil split to reduce brightness?

wiring like this will work,

 

[ehdwuld]

Re: Adding a capacitor to a coil split to reduce brightness?

wiring like this will work,

that will do what Ed said

but I still cant get my head around what its supposed to do

putting a resistor in series just increase the resistance

two caps in parallel add together

maybe another cap to ground in the place of that resistor to the switch

that would make the circuit see the two caps as the size of one big one



then again a treble bleed with a resistor and a cap in place of the resistor
might just dump some treble out


but I just cant see a resistor by itself doing that


I could be wrong

 

[Koreth]

Re: Adding a capacitor to a coil split to reduce brightness?

The resistor by itself will accomplish that because the way that the filters that make up the volume and tone controls work. Ignoring the inductance of a pickup to keep the math simple, the tone control acts as an RC filter. When the resistance is in series and the capacitor is in parallel, like our tone control, highs get dumped to ground. Increasing the size of the capacitor bleeds off more highs, but so does increasing the series resistance.

For example, lets take a PAF-ish neck humbucker with a resistance of 8kΩ and a .022µF tone cap. That gives us a filter with a corner frequency of 904.7Hz. Add a 470kΩ resistor in series and now our 478kΩ/.022µF filter has a corner frequency of 15Hz. Much more highs will be bled off in the second configuration.

 

[drdave]

Re: Adding a capacitor to a coil split to reduce brightness?

but I just cant see a resistor by itself doing that


I could be wrong

I agree with ehdwuld. The primary effect of the series resistor will be just to reduce the output by 3 dB (assuming a 500k pot set at "10").

I'm also curious as to why the OP wants to do this? To me, the point of coil splitting is to increase the frequency of the resonant peak and add additional brightness for a more single coil-like sound. If you're just going to remove that brightness with an additional capacitor, then it seems like the end result is just reduced output and added hum.

 

[ehdwuld]

Re: Adding a capacitor to a coil split to reduce brightness?

I have a treble bleed on the volume of my RG4
and I cant get a good bright single coil sound out of the split