Boosting pickup Volume?

dancox27

New member
So I have a project guitar that I've been fooling around with and just swapped a SD Hot rails for a Filtertron style humbucker. So right now I have the guitar with the Filtertron in the bridge, a single coil in the neck, and just a single volume control, 500k ohms (no caps tone pots etc). The hot rails had a lot of output as the name suggests, and went well with a single coil in the neck position with relatively equal volume levels when switching between them and using them together. But the filtertron has very low output, and I have much more volume drop than desired when switching to it. The single coil actually has MORE volume funny enough, I think because of the lack of a tone pot for the neck (no resistance to cut it back a bit) as well as there being more vibration of the strings in the neck position (correct me if I'm wrong on this). I have tried raising the pickup height, but when the volume is equal, it muddies up the tone to where I might as well just put the hot rails back in it's so close to the strings. I also have the neck pup to where again I like the tone of it, and would like to avoid lowering it, but also I would have to lower it past the pickguard to get equal volume at this point.

So bottom line is I was hoping to somehow BOOST the volume of the bridge filtertron a bit, without coloring the tone a whole lot and avoid CUTTING the volume of the neck because it sounds great when cranked wide open! Will adding a capacitor in the circuit for the bridge pup add some volume somehow? I'm still learning a lot of this stuff and not sure if I can achieve a good balance without a sacrifice, so I'd appreciate anyone's input! I would like to avoid pedals as well like a micro amp or clean boost since I would just like to switch to each pickup without tap dancing haha

Here's some more info it it helps: Guitar is a strat style guitar, with a fender mexican standard sc (probably around 5-6kohms) and pup in the bridge is a gfs liverpool filtertron (8kohms), wired to a 3 way switch and 500k pot, to the input jack. Very simple wiring setup. Thanks in advance!
 
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Re: Boosting pickup Volume?

This may seem like a dumb question, but have you tried lowering the single coil?
 
Re: Boosting pickup Volume?

Ps the mexican single coils have strong ceramic magnets. You can pry those off easily, pop out the slugs, and drop in alnico 3 polepieces. Amazing tone and not obnoxiously loud.
 
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