brightening hb pickups

[kopara]

Hello smart people,

I've come across a very interesting trick for brightening a dark HB pickup. I used it with my little '59 with success, but was curious about your opinion or experience with that.
Simple modification to the wiring that gives you the bottom end and power of HB, but sparkly hights of single coil. The principle is simple - if you have a 4 wire humbucker, you can connect the wire between two coils to the ground through a high-pass filter made of capacitor and a resistor (tone pot?).

My question is if anyone of you ever played around with different caps values for different sounds and found that "magic" combination of cap and res?

Any thoughts?

 

[ItsaBass]

Re: brightening hb pickups

Any thoughts? Yes: It doesn't work...at least not to do what you say it does. That is nothing but a standard tone control, but acting on only one coil instead of both. It does the opposite of what you say it does: it sends treble to ground. In order to remove low end with a cap, you need to put the cap in series with the pickup.

 

[idsnowdog]

Re: brightening hb pickups

Variations on that idea have been tried before. Our resident electronics guru Artietoo has what he calls a demud mod which is a resistor and capacitor between the two coils. I have also seen where people T the input to the second coil and then put a bass cut circuit in the circuit and T it back in after the second coil. That way they have a mixture of the first coil minus its bass combined with full humbucking sound.

Something that I have been playing with recently are passive bass cut filters after the coils and before the pots. Basically you can wire a 3-pole two way toggle so you can choose normal humbucking or bass cut signal for the neck pickup because I dislike muddy and boomy neck pickups.

 

[dominus]

Re: brightening hb pickups

Just wire it in parallel.

 

[kopara]

Re: brightening hb pickups

Parallel wiring will not stop the hum. This method will as I know. Or will it? like the 2'nd and 4'th position in strat?

 

[ItsaBass]

Re: brightening hb pickups

Parallel wiring will not stop the hum. This method will as I know.

Yes, parallel wiring will be humbucking. It works just like positions 2 and 4 on a Strat that uses a RW/RP middle pickup.

 

[kopara]

Re: brightening hb pickups

ok, thanx again

 

[MikE2e]

brightening hb pickups

Disagree ItsaBass that it is just a tone control on one coil.
It is a bit more complex than that.
That is what it seems but because it's on the first coil only it removes the Humbucker effect at high frequencies much more than the low end. The level will be -3dB because one coil hf is gone but as a humbucker hf response drops of because of the inductance anyway, the single coil effect comes in. I am building a pickup test rig, I will test this with a few.
Audibly you need about 10dB to double the level.

 

[J E C]

Re: brightening hb pickups

MikE2e, I would be interested to hear the results of your experiments.