Reducing lows on Strat

toneseeker74

New member
I have a poplar body maple neck/board Peavey Predator...a strat copy. Fender 57/62 pickups. Wilkinson vintage style bridge with steel block. 250k pots. Tone control on neck/mid and tone control for bridge. Typical 5-way switch. Playing through Gibson GA-8 Discoverer (parallel singled ended dual 6V6's with Jensen C12R). The bridge pickup sounds great, punchy & bright. The middle and neck pickups, however, sound boomy in the lows. Lowering the bass side of the pickups doesn't help. Neither does raising or lowering the overall heights of the pickups. Is this simply the nature of the beast with this setup? If it matters, the pickup polepieces are staggered for vintage fretboard radius (7 1/2"), but my neck has a 12" radius. Thoughts?
 
Re: Reducing lows on Strat

That can easily happen on lower-wattage amps. That's why I almost never play humbuckers through anything low powered. It's mud city once the amp starts giving you any kind of natural breakup. My humbucker guitars only sound their best through my 50 and 100W amps, IMHO. But it's not only a problem with humbuckers. Strats and Teles can get muddy in the forward positions as well. Also, if that thing has the original speaker, it's not helping you out. They were cheap to begin with, and they don't age gracefully.

What you can do with the Strat is to try lowering the neck and middle pickups. If it just doesn't work, what I'd suggest is converting your middle pot (which is now a treble control for the neck and middle pickups) into a passive bass control covering the same two pickups. It's easy to do. You just have to get a new cap and switch a few wires around. Basically, you go through the pot and cap with the hot signal, which filters low end out and dissipates it via the cap. That's instead of wiring it up to bleed treble to ground, like a regular tone control.
 
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Re: Reducing lows on Strat

Yeah, I was gonna say, you got a steel block, a 25.5 neck scale, the brightest strat single coils in probable existence, with a maple board and poplar body and you STILL think you have too much bass even with lowered pickups? Problem is not your guitar bro, it's the amp. Only other thing I could possibly suggest for the guitar is higher pot values but that will just add highs so the low end won't seem as prominent, and frankly with that amp up at appropriate levels I don't even think it will make a difference. Here are your options from my end of things.

1. Buy an EQ pedal and dial out the lower frequencies. You can even tweak the mids and highs around too. They are life savers with those little amps that give great tone but not a lot of range. Probably the cheapest and easiest way aside from Itsabass's but sucks to carry another pedal around.
2. If possible, have your amp modified for more EQ control than just 2 knobs, and take the power up a bit so has more headroom and volume available. This is more expensive than the pedal option but your amp has everything right in it already.
3. Buy a new amp all together with more flexible tone. Probably the most expensive option, especially if you don't wanna give up the one you're using.

Doing exactly what Itsabass said is going the cheapest and easiest way of going about this if you think the guitar is the issue and not the amp.

But honestly I wouldn't touch the guitar in this particular case. I'm just saying if you have an incredibly trebly guitar and still have too much bass then you gotta look elsewhere for the problem. It's not the best idea to go fixing things around the problem to make the problem acceptable when there are ways to just fix it.
 
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Re: Reducing lows on Strat

single ended 6v6 amp. Not much headroom. Bass frequencies require headroom. Neck pickups naturally have a lot more low end. More headroom will fix the issue.
There are a number of ways of getting more headroom. It might be as simple as a fresh set of tubes (jj's 6v6 has more headroom than the others by a long way), and/or possibly replacing the rectifier tube with a tube shaped plug in solid state rectifier such as this one: http://www.tubedepot.com/ssr.html. Both options are non-invasive, reversible, not expensive and take as long as it takes to change a light globe.
 
Re: Reducing lows on Strat

Randomly try other Strat pickups in the neck. Go by whatever you can snipe on Ebay.
 
Re: Reducing lows on Strat

That can easily happen on lower-wattage amps. That's why I almost never play humbuckers through anything low powered. It's mud city once the amp starts giving you any kind of natural breakup. My humbucker guitars only sound their best through my 50 and 100W amps, IMHO. But it's not only a problem with humbuckers. Strats and Teles can get muddy in the forward positions as well. Also, if that thing has the original speaker, it's not helping you out. They were cheap to begin with, and they don't age gracefully.

What you can do with the Strat is to try lowering the neck and middle pickups. If it just doesn't work, what I'd suggest is converting your middle pot (which is now a treble control for the neck and middle pickups) into a passive bass control covering the same two pickups. It's easy to do. You just have to get a new cap and switch a few wires around. Basically, you go through the pot and cap with the hot signal, which filters low end out and dissipates it via the cap. That's instead of wiring it up to bleed treble to ground, like a regular tone control.

Interesting. Where can I find a diagram? I have plenty of caps, solder, and wire:)
 
Re: Reducing lows on Strat

Yeah, I was gonna say, you got a steel block, a 25.5 neck scale, the brightest strat single coils in probable existence, with a maple board and poplar body and you STILL think you have too much bass even with lowered pickups? Problem is not your guitar bro, it's the amp. Only other thing I could possibly suggest for the guitar is higher pot values but that will just add highs so the low end won't seem as prominent, and frankly with that amp up at appropriate levels I don't even think it will make a difference. Here are your options from my end of things.

1. Buy an EQ pedal and dial out the lower frequencies. You can even tweak the mids and highs around too. They are life savers with those little amps that give great tone but not a lot of range. Probably the cheapest and easiest way aside from Itsabass's but sucks to carry another pedal around.
2. If possible, have your amp modified for more EQ control than just 2 knobs, and take the power up a bit so has more headroom and volume available. This is more expensive than the pedal option but your amp has everything right in it already.
3. Buy a new amp all together with more flexible tone. Probably the most expensive option, especially if you don't wanna give up the one you're using.

Doing exactly what Itsabass said is going the cheapest and easiest way of going about this if you think the guitar is the issue and not the amp.

But honestly I wouldn't touch the guitar in this particular case. I'm just saying if you have an incredibly trebly guitar and still have too much bass then you gotta look elsewhere for the problem. It's not the best idea to go fixing things around the problem to make the problem acceptable when there are ways to just fix it.

Yeah, I wasn't understanding how I could be getting flubby lows with such a bright guitar setup. I always liked the guitar through my 50 and 100 watt amps, but I sold them when I needed cash. The little Gibson sounds good up to a point, but when the overdrive starts to scream then it's sag city. The C12R is actually an upgrade from the original speaker, and it has been reconed by Orange County Speaker. This speaker actually HAS lows, whereas the original speaker was all high mids and highs.

I have been wanting to get a Traynor YBA-1 again, so that will probably solve my problems:)
 
Re: Reducing lows on Strat

single ended 6v6 amp. Not much headroom. Bass frequencies require headroom. Neck pickups naturally have a lot more low end. More headroom will fix the issue.
There are a number of ways of getting more headroom. It might be as simple as a fresh set of tubes (jj's 6v6 has more headroom than the others by a long way), and/or possibly replacing the rectifier tube with a tube shaped plug in solid state rectifier such as this one: http://www.tubedepot.com/ssr.html. Both options are non-invasive, reversible, not expensive and take as long as it takes to change a light globe.

I'm actually running JJ 6V6's right now, and I swapped the 5Y3 rectifier for something that drops less voltage...can't remember exactly what of the top of my head...maybe a 5Y4?
 
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