Re: Esquire wiring in reverse - can it be done ?
Thanks guys . . . so i can get a bridge-like tone from the neck then !?
James
Kinda. Not really. Each pickup's sound comes from the area of the string it's sensing, so if you suck the bass out of the neck pickup it'll sound like a thinner neck pickup. To my ear, the Esquire wiring suffers from the same thing-- the 'neck' setting sounds like a wooly bridge pickup.
You might be able to experiment with small capacitors in parallel with the pickup to change it's resonant frequency to more of a midrange squawk, in addition to the bass cut.
Anyway, here's how high and low pass filters work: capacitors block frequencies below their own resonant frequency. Or you could say they let through frequencies that are above a certain point.
So a traditional guitar tone control(a low-pass filter) connects hot to ground through a cap and a variable resistor(pot). When the pot is on 0, it's effectively out of the circuit and the cap allows the highs straight through to ground, where they die a quick and painless death.
A high-pass consists of a cap directly in the signal path. So if you pick the right value cap, it lets only the highs and mids through and blocks the bass. If you wire a variable resistor as a bypass around the cap, you can control how much bass gets around it.
Aaaand, a midrange resonance consists of a capacitor in parallel with an inductor. Guitar pickups qualify as an inductor, so when your tone control is on 0, the cap and pickup are free to resonate together. That's why most tone controls change character completely when all the way down. Also the secret to the classic "woman tone" where you use a smaller value cap than normal; it changes the pickup's resonant peak to somewhere in the midrange instead of the low end.
So then, my wild-hair speculation would be to run a small cap(about half the woman tone value) to ground through a bit of resistance to take the edge off the resonance, maybe 5-10k. That should give it some midrange focus. Then a larger cap(Fender bass tone control) in the signal path with a pot around it. That should thin the sound nicely. You'll have to sweep the pot around to find the right amount of bass, then take it out of the circuit and measure it so you know what resistor to drop in.
