Trying To Wrap My Head Around This...

[magillver]

Good afternoon (PST)! I've been noodling with a guitar science project, based around the Stag Mag pickup. Common lore tells us that we generally use 250k pots for single coils, and 500k pots for humbuckers. I've been trying to play around with a circuit using a push/pull 500k pot and a 510k resistor in parallel, to try to roughly emulate a 250k pot, for when I coil split the Stag Mag. I've tried placing it between lugs 1 & 3, as well as between the signal input and output, as I've seen both of those variations recommended in various forums on the interwebs, and I hear no difference. It occurs to me that with the volume all the way up, there's only a couple of ohms whether one is using a 250k or a 500k, so A) why would the 250k supposedly be 'darker' than the 500k? And B) assuming that it actually makes a difference, is there a 'correct' way to accomplish my goal?

 

[jeremy]

as someone who uses the volume control a lot on my guitars, i dont like the resistor trick since it seems to mess with the taper i roll back, but it does work well when the volume is full up. a lower value pot pushes the amplitude of the resonant peak down in my understanding, which to us sounds like its darker. i dont know how best to add the resistor, but im sure someone else will chime in.

 

[beaubrummels]

I've found that a StagMag doesn't need the extra science to sound 'right' both split and series. I had one in my Jackson with 500k vol/tone and a 5-way that had

1. straight out humbucker, no tone control
2. humbucker with tone control
3. parallel coils
4. split toward bridge side
5. split toward neck side

and split sounded like a perfect spanky strat, while series humbucking sounded like a Custom Custom, slightly looser maybe.

 

[magillver]

I'm running a pair of them through Triple Shots, the pot conversion is more just to see if it would work and/or how it would effect the overall sound...