Hot rails without tone control connected?

[omni 1]

How much load does the tone control add? Is it huge? Yes ,I need to buy a meter.. Gonna get one. I have it connected now but was wondering. Thanks.

 

[Rex_Rocker]

I personally had a problem where the Hot Rails for Tele was way too dark. I had it with a single 500K volume pot, no tone.

I wish I had tried it with a 1 Meg pot.

Sorry, I cannot give you an amount of how much a tone knob loads the pickup down. But I do think it's significant.

 

[omni 1]

I need to get a meter and do some experimenting. Thanks.

 

[Mincer]

It is a pretty dark sounding pickup no matter what. Using it without a tone might brighten it a little bit, but it isn't night and day.

 

[omni 1]

It's weird because I had it in another strat and it sounded killer! Very strange. 250k pots on both strats.

 

[freefrog]

The load added by a tone pot directly depends on its resistance.

The web is full of useful calculators like the following one (allowing to put volume pot as resistor 1 and tone pot as resistor 2) : https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/tools/parallel-resistance-calculator/

The effect of a resistive load is roughly the same for all pickups: it flattens their resonant peak. See the figure 14 in this page:
http://buildyourguitar.com/resources/lemme/

More details here: https://guitarnuts2.proboards.com/thread/7171/pot-values-load-pots

These pages don't take in account a possible variation of input impedance in the first host (pedal or amp). Nor do they talk about variations in capacitive load (due to wiring and cables) which is absolutely critical for the sound of passive pickups. But they already give a good idea of what happens with different resistive loads in the usual 1M input.

And I'd consider no-load tone pots instead of thinking to disconnect a tone control, but that's just me. YMMV.

 

[freefrog]

It's weird because I had it in another strat and it sounded killer! Very strange. 250k pots on both strats.

Same wiring in the two guitars exactly? No brass or aluminium pickguard on one of them?

But yes, different guitars sound differently. The last American Std. that I've rewired was incredibly bassier acoustically than my own Strats and the same pickups sounded very different in it.

 

[omni 1]

Thanks, I undid the jump wire and it came more alive. More punch and brilliance. Not a HUGE difference but enough. I had put the jump wire in when it had Tex Mex pups in it year ago, 2008 to be exact. lol. It's a 2008 Road Worn Strat. All 3 of those pickups died on me. Fender was cool and sent me a new set. I never liked them though.

 

[omni 1]

freefrog, Thanks for the links! I have been playing since I was 13, I am 57 now. The thing is I never cared about the science behind it all as long as it sounded good. I guess I have way too much time on my hands now. lol.. After all these years I got curious why and how ..

 

[Ivan75]

I'm using the Hot Rails in the bridge of 2004. Am. Series Strat for years, with Lollars Blackface single coils. The bridge has independent tone control and all the pots are 250K, stock cap. It's not dark at all and it's not split in the position 2, so it's full Hot Rails + the middle, sounds great overdriven or with fuzz, nicely balanced, cleans are great, too. A bit less ''quacky'' in position 2, but it's still awesome. I THINK it showed 14K when measured with all the pots and pickups in the circuit and fully opened. I remember thinking about splitting it in the position 2, but I just think it sounds great the way it's wired now, no need for any ''fixing''.

 

[DonP]

Another option is a push pull to go parallel with the Hot Rails. That's my plan when I wire the one up that I have.