Darken my tone with suggestions

A

Alexndrix

New member
As the title says, I wish to make my tone darker than it is.

I own a Stratocaster American Standard 2015. I modded it for a master tone and volume, and yes I'm aware that losing a tone pot does add up to the brightness I am complaining about. However, the guitar was still bright even before the mod.

My previous guitar was a MIM Strat, which, to my ears, seems to have more power and is darker.

Can I get suggestions on this, please? Resistors, Caps, Longer cables, whatever has worked for you. All I can tell you is I've tried pickup heights, EQ pedals and different string gauges. Pure nickels, yeah they did help, however, that treble jumps out as soon as the higher strings come into play.
 
Re: Darken my tone with suggestions

I know its hard to decribe, but i oftenmiss are more fundamental and fuller tone with some strats, a tad less attack helped too. This cant be achieved with a tone pot. i learned that higher wound pickups and more brass parts help. Also a rosewood fingerboard and swampash body is more my way. Maybe more mass with the tuners like grovers or schallers.
 
Re: Darken my tone with suggestions

You could play in E flat like Hendrix or Vaughan. Coiled cable also work wonders. Those have helped me a lot more than pickups have.
 
Re: Darken my tone with suggestions

Well, you are playing a strat, which is usually a bright guitar. It could be worse, you could be playing a tele. If you really want a darker tone, why not get pickups with a darker/warmer tone? You will always have to fight the ones that came in it, if that is what you are after.
 
Re: Darken my tone with suggestions

Couple ideas:

- Behringer Feedback Destroyer -Pro/Parametric EQ pedal or similar pedal with high-cut effect capability. https://forum.seymourduncan.com/showthread.php?77627-High-cut-filtering-for-distorted-guitar

- Try a set of single-coil pickups where the pole pieces are not staggered in height. http://forums.fender.com/viewtopic.php?t=22492

- experiment with larger values of capacitor on the tone pot. Here's the easiest way to do that sampling: see section "Finding the Perfect Value" in this article: https://www.premierguitar.com/articles/auditioning-tone-capacitors-part-ii-2
 
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Re: Darken my tone with suggestions

- Tune down (Eb, D)
- Bigger cap (33,47,68nf)
- Smaller pots (200k, I just put 100k pots in my jazz guitar. Insane huge dark tone.)
- Cap and resistor in series across your output jack's hot and ground lugs (50k resistor, 22nf cap for example)
- Pups in series

You can make your ax as dark as you want for cheap with your existing pickups. But I do like me some hotter darker pups and that will work too.
 
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Re: Darken my tone with suggestions

Yeah, I was going to recommend 100k-200k pots. You can also use the Pickup Booster, not set to a boost, but use the resonant frequency switches, which give you 2 choices to lower the frequency.
 
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