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

Muddy Pickups Mods with Caps
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:

Muddy Pickups Mods with Caps
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.

Muddy Pickups Mods with Caps
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!

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
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.

Stacked humbuckers
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
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
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
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.

Bridge Humbucker pickups ShootOut

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!