jafo
New member
Certain questions and answers constantly re-occur here, and might be worth a FAQ or sticky. I'm starting with the easiest and cheapest changes, moving towards more difficult and expensive mods. I'm sure I've missed some, and may well be suffering under delusions of adequacy.
Copyright
Are you kidding me? I learned all of this from this forum. :thanks: The phrasing (and mistakes!) are mine, but this belongs to all of us. Unless you're making money from it, in which case I want some!
Height
This isn't really a mod, but it's so easy to overlook. Pickup height matters; you need to experiment to find what works best for you. Closer to the strings means more output and treble, but can warp the tone. Further away means less output and more warmth, but can also warp the tone.
You can often brighten a humbucker by lowering it overall, but raising the screws -- this means that less frequencies will get canceled. (See below.)
Screws
The standard Gibson (and hence Duncan) humbucker screw is a 5-50 filister head, 3/4" long. Changing the screw, changes the magnetic field that senses the string's movement. Higher masses (a slug) sense more than lower (hex screws); wider heads (slug) sense more than thinner (hex); and polepieces that are closer to a string, pick up more of the signal. This suggests a lot of possibilities.
On a typical hummer, the screws are oriented towards the bridge (where the harmonics are higher-order and thus brighter) on a bridge pup, or towards the center of the string (where the harmonics are lower-order, and warmer) for the neck pup. Since the slugs normally pick up more signal than the screws, this adds a little sparkle to the neck and warmth to the bridge. You can spin the pup around, changing its direction so that the slugs are closer to the bridge for more treble. You can also raise the screws so that they pick up more signal than the slugs.
Shorter screws are brighter than longer screws, so you can buy some shorter ones (1/2" is a good place to start). You can also cut your screws, but that's kind of permanent, not to mention an easy way to cut yourself, so don't do it.
Hex screws, having less mass and width, will be brighter yet.
A old trick is to remove the screws entirely to get something similar to a single-coil tone.
Magnet
A pickup is basically copper wire coiled around a magnet. Each magnet has a different tone and feel, and it's both cheap and easy to change them. The Duncan Custom, Custom Custom, and Custom 5 are all identical except for the magnet -- ceramic, A2, and A5, respectively.
Alnico is a magnetic alloy made of ALuminum, NIckel, and CObalt. It's widely held to have a musical, organic sound and feel. It comes in several formulae, each of which has its own characteristic strength and tonal response. The vast majority of vintage pickups, whether single-coil or humbucker, use Alnico magnets.
Alnico 2: Warm, round, heavy in the midrange; smooth and sweet. Can be overly dark in a dark-toned guitar. Softer attack.
A3: Weaker grade than A2. Brighter, even less bottom.
A4: Balanced EQ, no range of frequencies predominating; often called "neutral."
A5: Higher output, with emphasis on the high and low frequencies, with the midrange seemingly "scooped" out. Most common magnet.
A8: Said to be a cross between A2 and ceramic; high output, balanced tone, warm yet edgy.
Ceramic magnets are made from fusing rare earth and, well, ceramic materials. Very high output, with extremely wide frequency response. Used in both high-end custom and low-end budget pickups.
Electronics
Most hummers are wired with both coils in series (output of one wired to the input of the other), but you can also wire them in parallel, use just one coil, and a lot of other things.
Higher-ohm volume and tone pots retain more treble. Most people use 500k pots with humbuckers, and 250k pots for singlecoils; but there's a lot to be said for using a lower-ohm pot to add warmth to the bridge, and a higher-ohm pot to the neck to add sparkle. Check your pots; a "500k" might actually only be 330k.
You can annoy a lot of people (and dogs) easily by using a 1M volume pot on a Strat bridge pup.
To retain treble when turning down the volume pot, wire a small-value capacitor across the input and output lugs of the pot; this lets some of the higher frequencies bleed through.
Coils
Who says they have to be identical? You can take mismatched coils and assemble them on the same baseplate. Since each coil has its own resonances, you can get some striking effects, ranging from a subtle opening up (such as in Gibson's Burstbucker or Lindy Fralin's Unbucker, possibly in a Pearly Gates), to the complexity of a C5/'59 hybrid, to a full-on "dual resonance" like in some of DiMarzio's offerings.
Copyright
Are you kidding me? I learned all of this from this forum. :thanks: The phrasing (and mistakes!) are mine, but this belongs to all of us. Unless you're making money from it, in which case I want some!
Height
This isn't really a mod, but it's so easy to overlook. Pickup height matters; you need to experiment to find what works best for you. Closer to the strings means more output and treble, but can warp the tone. Further away means less output and more warmth, but can also warp the tone.
You can often brighten a humbucker by lowering it overall, but raising the screws -- this means that less frequencies will get canceled. (See below.)
Screws
The standard Gibson (and hence Duncan) humbucker screw is a 5-50 filister head, 3/4" long. Changing the screw, changes the magnetic field that senses the string's movement. Higher masses (a slug) sense more than lower (hex screws); wider heads (slug) sense more than thinner (hex); and polepieces that are closer to a string, pick up more of the signal. This suggests a lot of possibilities.
On a typical hummer, the screws are oriented towards the bridge (where the harmonics are higher-order and thus brighter) on a bridge pup, or towards the center of the string (where the harmonics are lower-order, and warmer) for the neck pup. Since the slugs normally pick up more signal than the screws, this adds a little sparkle to the neck and warmth to the bridge. You can spin the pup around, changing its direction so that the slugs are closer to the bridge for more treble. You can also raise the screws so that they pick up more signal than the slugs.
Shorter screws are brighter than longer screws, so you can buy some shorter ones (1/2" is a good place to start). You can also cut your screws, but that's kind of permanent, not to mention an easy way to cut yourself, so don't do it.
Hex screws, having less mass and width, will be brighter yet.
A old trick is to remove the screws entirely to get something similar to a single-coil tone.
Magnet
A pickup is basically copper wire coiled around a magnet. Each magnet has a different tone and feel, and it's both cheap and easy to change them. The Duncan Custom, Custom Custom, and Custom 5 are all identical except for the magnet -- ceramic, A2, and A5, respectively.
Alnico is a magnetic alloy made of ALuminum, NIckel, and CObalt. It's widely held to have a musical, organic sound and feel. It comes in several formulae, each of which has its own characteristic strength and tonal response. The vast majority of vintage pickups, whether single-coil or humbucker, use Alnico magnets.
Alnico 2: Warm, round, heavy in the midrange; smooth and sweet. Can be overly dark in a dark-toned guitar. Softer attack.
A3: Weaker grade than A2. Brighter, even less bottom.
A4: Balanced EQ, no range of frequencies predominating; often called "neutral."
A5: Higher output, with emphasis on the high and low frequencies, with the midrange seemingly "scooped" out. Most common magnet.
A8: Said to be a cross between A2 and ceramic; high output, balanced tone, warm yet edgy.
Ceramic magnets are made from fusing rare earth and, well, ceramic materials. Very high output, with extremely wide frequency response. Used in both high-end custom and low-end budget pickups.
Electronics
Most hummers are wired with both coils in series (output of one wired to the input of the other), but you can also wire them in parallel, use just one coil, and a lot of other things.
Higher-ohm volume and tone pots retain more treble. Most people use 500k pots with humbuckers, and 250k pots for singlecoils; but there's a lot to be said for using a lower-ohm pot to add warmth to the bridge, and a higher-ohm pot to the neck to add sparkle. Check your pots; a "500k" might actually only be 330k.
You can annoy a lot of people (and dogs) easily by using a 1M volume pot on a Strat bridge pup.
To retain treble when turning down the volume pot, wire a small-value capacitor across the input and output lugs of the pot; this lets some of the higher frequencies bleed through.
Coils
Who says they have to be identical? You can take mismatched coils and assemble them on the same baseplate. Since each coil has its own resonances, you can get some striking effects, ranging from a subtle opening up (such as in Gibson's Burstbucker or Lindy Fralin's Unbucker, possibly in a Pearly Gates), to the complexity of a C5/'59 hybrid, to a full-on "dual resonance" like in some of DiMarzio's offerings.