Magnet swap to fix JB's muddy cleans

[Myaccount876]

Re: Magnet swap to fix JB's muddy cleans

Haven't read the rest of the thread, so don't chew me out if I missed something.

If you're using it basically as a one pickup guitar with the duckbucker for occassional quack, are you getting your cleans by rolling down the volume? If so, that will quickly remove high end and can create a muddy clean sound. What you can try is a .001 uF capacitor between the wiper and pickup lead on the volume pot. That will retain treble as you turn the volume down. If you don't like the taper or find it too bright, you can always play around with capacitor values or add in a resistor and play with those values. There's a couple ways of doing a treble-bleed mod that you can find with a quick Google search. It'll also probably be the cheapest mod you can do at ~20 cents per capacitor.

Also, play with screw height - that costs nothing, so it doesn't hurt to try. If it doesn't help, then time to experiment with other suggestions.

 

[freefrog]

Re: Magnet swap to fix JB's muddy cleans

Yep, the treble bleed option has been mentioned above (post 57). It is surely the cheapest/simplest solution and I agree about a crude 0.001 cap (1nF) as being a good trick to try with high gain pickups. That's what I have in various axes with powerful bridge PU's.
Now, personally, I don't find it so easy to adjust in live situations and it can make the bass a bit thin (that's why I rely on parallel wiring to clean the sound in a consistent way when I use high gain pickups on stage, instead of lowering their volume with a 1nF treble bleed... but that's just me and any other solution is "valid" as long as it works for the musician who uses it, IMHO).

There's still many other tricks to try from simple old school strategies to digital emulation, depending on the result wanted.


I didn't want to be too talkative about that in my previous post since this topic was already long but when I see it now I feel free to impudently forget any self censorship. :haha:


20 years ago, I had a JB in bridge position in a LP. I plugged it in a Marshall so I needed to seriously reshape its tone when I wanted to obtain a clear sound. I was doing that with an EQ set to reverse the Randy Rhoads / Slash boosting trick: it scooped the midrange along a very low Q factor (the EQing was like a squashed V). It worked well enough to give crystal clean tones...

Acoustic simulators are another solution.

Let's add that a good ol' Lawrence Q filter is able to give the cleanest acoustic sound to a L500XL and that a Q filter is not that hard to build nor to mount...

FWIW.

 

[Lewguitar]

Re: Magnet swap to fix JB's muddy cleans

Haven't read the rest of the thread, so don't chew me out if I missed something.

If you're using it basically as a one pickup guitar with the duckbucker for occassional quack, are you getting your cleans by rolling down the volume? If so, that will quickly remove high end and can create a muddy clean sound. What you can try is a .001 uF capacitor between the wiper and pickup lead on the volume pot. That will retain treble as you turn the volume down. If you don't like the taper or find it too bright, you can always play around with capacitor values or add in a resistor and play with those values. There's a couple ways of doing a treble-bleed mod that you can find with a quick Google search. It'll also probably be the cheapest mod you can do at ~20 cents per capacitor.

Also, play with screw height - that costs nothing, so it doesn't hurt to try. If it doesn't help, then time to experiment with other suggestions.

My PRS guitars use a 180 pf cap across the input and output (wiper) of the volume control.

Very subtle but does retain treble when the pot is turned way down.

Really tho, the OP needs to ditch the JB and just get a pickup he likes better.

Tastes change and IMO the JB is no longer serving his needs.

 

[freefrog]

Re: Magnet swap to fix JB's muddy cleans

Divine omniscience is not among my skills so I don't know what the OP needs.

But there's a thought that I'd like to share : IME/IMHO, treble bleeds need to be designed according to the context - not only the pickup and guitar but also the cable and input stage used.
Related link: http://www.diystompboxes.com/smfforum/index.php?topic=90895.0 [the .xls in the last post being useful, albeit it doesn't take in account external things like the cable and amp].

Schematically, though,I'd venture to say that low power PU's work well with a low value cap (possibily coupled to a series or parallel resistor) while high inductance transducers (above 6 Henries like the JB) take nicely advantage of a 1nF treble cap without resistor.

IME / IMHO / FWIW / YMMV...