“Only they who believeth in their guitar quest shall be granted passage”

Tag: Pickups

Muddy Pickups Mods with Caps

Dull guitar sound is always bothering everyone. We re-fretted the fretboard, changed the strings, bought an expensive equalizer pedal, even we changed the pickups with a new expensive one. BUT, it doesn’t always work that way, buying new things doesn’t take us to new things beside product knowledge. We know we can always modify things which we already have to get better results. And this is one of it. i got this from the Seymour Duncan’s Facebook

A muddy neck pickups is one annoying problem, I tried to overcome it by doing Muddy Pickups Mods with Caps and i really am satisfied by it. you know, Add capacitors to the guitar circuit is a favorite thing. It’s cheap and easy. this could be one of best of it.

There are two things you can do about this mod.

– First is wiring the .047 capacitor with the output of the pickup on the switch

– Second is wiring the .047 capacitor with the output of the pickup on volume knob

removing muddy neck pickup mod

In this post, I’ve done the first option, hopefully someone did the second option and share me some feedback

So i wired the .047 caps on the switch on my 2 guitars. first guitar is my Fender Spalted Maple Telecaster. I felt that BOTH OF PICKUPS were still too muddy while i had lowered the pickups heights to get brighter sound, so I took two of .047 caps and wired them to both pickups output on the switch. Here’s the pic:

removing muddy neck pickup Tele mods

i hope this Muddy Pickups Mods pics are easy enough to understand

for my next guitar is Gretsch G5236 electromatic pro jet 125th anniversary . Here i felt that the neck pickup had a big brightness sound difference compared to bridge pickup, so i put only one of .047 caps on the switch. my expectation was to add more color to That Great Gretsch Sound and IMHO, I REALLY did it with this mod.

removing muddy neck pickup Gretsch mods

one thing i need to improve is my video sound record. It seems not enough to justify the sound, but I assure you will get big difference when you try this Muddy Pickups Mods. and this is exactly what i wanted.

I have something to say overall about this.

this Muddy Pickups Mods is useful.

I’ve been trying to get brighter sounds on my guitar using compression pedals, pickups height adjustments and the most i hate, using equalizer bands ( i want my guitar sound like it is without any output enhancements/adjustments). this mod is significant, it removes unwanted mud-bass-like sound so the sound clarity goes on top.

so, do you like it? or you wanna share it with your bandmate? have good day, virtuosos!
March 5, 2015
Old Guitar Pickups, is it worth the sound?

This question is bothering me sometimes. I’m sort of a retro-music style fan and likely I’d like to have a set of vintage guitar equipments which i can bring them on stage and meet these days’ standard live performances. Reason i have for this is Legendary songs were built in old times with that times’ technology. Old Amps and cabs, old guitars, old pickups.(while I know nowadays the old equipment is aged by time and some of their quality are decreased) So I made a simulation with old and rusty stuff, and i only have an old guitar pickup, a 1×10″ cabinet and a my tiny Xenyx 502 Behringer mixer for this purpose.

Old Guitar Pickups

here’s my old cabinet

And I installed this old guitar pickups to my first guitar

now it’s ready for shoot out. here’s the video:

now, here’s the thing. I use Boss GT 8’s preamp modeler which i shouldn’t in this shootout, but i made no equalizer setting for this, so i guess it’s fair enough because i meant to play this with my own stage setting.for the pickup, i added a magnet bar below the pickup to increase the audio signal capturing.

the conclusion:
– about old guitar pickups. It’s the matter of technology. better pickup wiring and shielding, pole pieces positions determine the result. This old pickup has a huge microphonic feedback which is unacceptable on stages. still it has nice sound i guess. On the video I used both direct line in record to my Zoom Q3HD and using Zoom Q3HD built-in microphones. You might want to use old pickups for recording purposes to get some unique old audio signal then you can process it later on recording softwares.
– about old n rusty cabinet. well this is interesting. The speaker speaks uniquely. It maybe rusty(it has holes on its cone) but that’s what became the sound color. you can check on the video and listen the differences basically between direct recording and mic recording. noted that no matter what the amps are, the cabinet and speakers have big role in sound coloring for mic recording

well, you can consider this post is a junk and a worthless experiment, but i made it originally for the cure of my curiosity and for my guitar learning purposes. see ya later 🙂
September 17, 2014
HumBucker Pickups, Pick Up What You Like

Bright tonality, tight sound, and Hum-free. Humbucking pickups made history in modern rock and metal genres. they are versatile and well-known as best in delivering distortion into Amps.

seymour duncan pickups on spalted maple tele

around us guitarists there are alternating magnetic fields which create hum, as we know that alternating current electrical equipments such as amps produce magnetic fields, and, the humbuckers reduce alternating magnetic fields’ interference via phase cancellation by connecting the coils together out of phase.

Other Humbucker designs

– Stacked humbuckers.

this is an alternative humbuckers design to compensate old guitar designs which has single coil size hole on its body. instead of put the pickups side-by-side, stacked humbucker saves size into single coils’ size and can be installed to stratocasters model.

Hotrails and Quadrails on Fernandes FR 55

– Rail humbuckers. this design divides single coils pickups size in half. These pickups are just like a normal, a bit smaller, humbucking pickups. the two pole pieces resemble a rail. currently I put these pickups into my Fernandes FR-55 guitar which has awesome-looking.

– Coil splits. actually this is another stacked humbuckers which can be separated into single coils using the coil tap. my Fender Special Edition Custom Telecaster Spalted Maple Top HH uses this concept and i applied it to my Fernandes too. sounds great with more tone options.

Gretsch Mini Humbucking Pickups on Gretsch G5236 electromatic pro jet 125th anniversary

other design you might notice is mini humbucking pickups. basically they are resized humbuckers and this design is cute! :))

various humbucker pickups on guitars

The main idea of humbuckers is reducing hum, so we can have no worries about overdrive hum and distortion noises. we can hit the blues note clearly. But it also creates another sound which is different from single coil pickups’ and become recommendations for modern rock and metal guitarists.

For the sake of my life-time guitar learning, Here I made Humbucker pickups shoot out on YouTube, focused on bridge position. Each type produces slightly different sound but generally it’s bright. I’m using ZOOM Q3HD for capturing the videos, while I connect its Line-In directly to my Behringer Xenyx 502 mixer’s Main Out. I was not using any DirectBox, I only use BOSS GT 8 as my guitar effects processor connected to my mixer.

so, have you consider your humbuckers pickups choice for your guitar? hope you like my video shootout and get some better consideration after you watch it. have nice day, metalheads!
September 4, 2014
Problem solution possibilites for humming Pickups

what makes me wonder is, how all virtuosos can be hum-free? i have an old 90’s Fernandes guitar which has noise-pickups. it is HSS and still i couldn’t find solution possibilities for this until couple hours ago. this is what i got so far in searching the hum problem for my guitar Fernandes FR-55. it’s been over a year ago and finally i got the closest possible solution on this.at very first i thought it was the circuitry. so i learn about soldering the components and find out what caused the hum. as far as i could get before the next one is 60Hz cycle hum. It’s called “60 Hz cycle hum” because it’s a signal that oscillates at 60 Hertz – sixty cycles a second. too complicated, why is it audible, since 60 Hz is so low in frequency range? here’s why. we can hear it because it cycles, its harmonic notes is what we heard. 60, 120, 240, 480, 960, 1920, 3840, 7680, 15360, 30720,.. there we can hear them all ringing loudly. creating ground loop is the very first idea in my mind for my guitar, and hum cancelling with humbucker pickups came to next.
but, it against the fact that my guitar is HSS which means i got humbucker, why is it still humming?so i went deeper search about it and still, i couldn’t find the solution. I’ve double-checked the soldering part and grounding, and my fernandes was very neat and i couldn’t take soldering/grounding as the main problem. (it’s japan-made and its circuitry is one of the most neat working i’ve ever seen). even i considered to change the pickups, while i know my fernandes pickups sounds good actually , no need to replace the pickups with the expensive one (Seymour Duncan® works best on my spalted maple tele, but…it means more $$$!!!! ) …the best thing i got so far from learning soldering and grounding is how to keep bright tone when guitar volume knob is being lowered.

if i just could remove the hum…
then, out of nowhere (actually like something already deep inside was screaming).. i had a thought to do modification on pickups and DIY pickups making, and i began to analyze what exactly was wrong with my Fernandes. I’ve written it on paper somewhere which i lost it now, but here they are:

– my humming pickups can’t stand the high gain
– it has very low noise in clean tones, but it gets humming when i raised the amp volume
– when i had fun with the whammy bar, the guitar springs sound creaking into pickups
– when i knocked the body, the pickups deliver the knocking sound, louder than my other guitars

it’s like my pickups act like a microphone. so i whine to Google , just write these words “guitar pickups act like microphone!”

and the miracle came.. this guitar-pickup-act-like-microphone problem is called microphonic feedback, which is unacceptable for pickups. a normal pickups will deliver the strings vibration only, and that is what should happen, it is just the very basic idea for guitar pickups.

back to my pickups problem which has the very similar symptoms, the best solution for my fernandes problem is pickups potting. the idea is to wrap the pickups with wax in order to make them in fixed position, so they can’t vibrate and deliver sound other than guitar strings vibration.

now i know exactly what I’m gonna do this time for my Fernandes FR-55. i’ll get the “pickups potting process” into preparation right away. hopefully it works. wish me luck

August 14, 2014