Re: SSL-5T - Dialling-in a tapped single-coil
Bros/gentlemen, I would like to point out something to you involved :
This one :
http://www.neighborhost.com/images/spin-a-tap.png shunts TAP to a HOT,
and this one :
http://www.seymourduncan.com/pdfs/support/schematics/1h_1v_1sas.pdf shunts SPLIT to a GROUND.
While I never personally tested tapped SCs and I'm not sure this would make significant difference in overall result with tapped SCs, I would suggest testing spin-a-tap by shunting it to a ground instead. It may be less thin on "full-tap" this way, and it could also be shunted with some tiny cap ( <200,300 pF ) instead of a plain wire in order to keep some more lows of the part being shunted in tapped signal. Also, when shunting to a ground instead to a hot, I'm positive that value of a pot plays significant role and no-load pot is the one to be used.
my .02$
My excuse to those whose comments were based on their experience of shunting SC's tap to a ground.
Actually, I don't think that will make a difference. Let me explain why. On the spin-a-split, it doesn't matter whether you go to hot or ground other than simply determining which coil you want to use. Split to ground for the stud coil. Split to hot for the screw coil.
On the tap, its not much different. Here's how I first tried the "tap":
This allowed me to tap-to-ground or tap-to-hot. There was a
very subtle difference between using the inside or outside coil. I believe the outside, (tap-to-hot), was a smidgen brighter.
So, if we go back to the diagram I made above, when the pot is all the way in one direction, we have this:
When its all the way in the other direction, we have this:
Both of those work exactly like using a switch, with one small difference, which I'll come back to. The problem is, with the pot somewhere in the middle, we have this:
So we have attenuation on both sides of the coil-half, and thus, we get a reduced signal from either extreme. The first time I used the pot, I wired it like this, which should have aleviated that problem:
But it didn't. It has some weird "other" symptom. I'm suspicious that I had something wired wrong. I'm going to retry that one.
As for that "other" difference, I used a DPDT switch to go back and forth between a 250k pot and a 1meg pot. At full on, there was no difference between the two. AT the "tap" position, the 1 meg was a little brighter, but not in a good way. I liked the 250k better.
I'll try that next.
