Taming one pickup brightness

[Webfoot]

I have a Seth Lover and JB Jr in a guitar with one volume and one tone pot knob. Is there a way to hang an additional capacitor dedciated to just one pickup to permanently reduce it's brightness compared to the other? For me I needed to reduce the brightness of the Seth Lover pickup because the JB Jr is much more mellow sounding. What capacitor would I use (a starting point) and where would I connect it? I am using 250K volume and tone pots.

Thanks

 

[JacksonMIA]

Re: Taming one pickup brightness

You can do it, I'm just not sure of the simplest way. Let me chew on it a bit.

I assume you've got a three-way switch to select the pups?

 

[Zhangliqun]

Re: Taming one pickup brightness

It can be done pretty easily but you have to select a cap with a very tiny value or it will be too dark sounding. Something like 200 pf (NOT uf) is a good starting point.

I tried it myself but couldn't find a value that was low enough.

If it's just a 2-knob guitar, you could also try a concentric pot (two pots in one) and thus have two separate tone pots.

 

[Zhangliqun]

Re: Taming one pickup brightness

As for how to do it, Duncan does this with their neck Invader. Remove the surround tape on the pickuup, solder one end of the cap to the main hot lead and solder the other end to the baseplate.

You could also do it at the switch, solder one end to the pickup's hot lead where it is soldered to the switch and the other end to the switch chassis.

Or if it's a vintage 2-conductor (wire inside braided shield), solder one end to the end of the hot lead, the other end to the braiding.

There's a million ways to do it.

 

[JacksonMIA]

Re: Taming one pickup brightness

My first thought was doing that at the switch, but I knew there would be other ways. Thanks, Zhang.

 

[Zhangliqun]

Re: Taming one pickup brightness

No problem -- just remember, the whole idea is to get the cap soldered across the ground and hot of the pickup before the signal gets to the switch output. As long as you grasp that, you can figure out a bazillion different ways to do it.

 

[ES350]

Re: Taming one pickup brightness

You can do it from the hot lug of the Seth on the switch--it works; shunts some highs to ground. This is an old trick with Tele bridge pickups...try anywhere from 75 to 200 pF values, maybe a little lower for a HB (silver micas in these values are pretty common at supply houses like AES).