![$vboptions[bbtitle]](../../gifs/tdpr-headTRANS.gif)
teleblasted
March 16th, 2010, 02:25 PM
Thought I’d share a little development work I did last Saturday on my MIM Tele.
As the 'energetic front man' in a band I don’t have time in the thick of things for tweaking tone controls, so I thought I’d have a go at solving the problem of taking the the edge off of the bridge pu, and making the instrument more useful to me at the same time.
I never play mid position with two pickups, as the result never seems worthwhile to my ears. I’d much rather get good sounds from the front and rear pickups individually. So I’ve rewired the pickup switch to; front and rear positions as standard, but the middle position is now bridge pu alone with a tuning capacitor to ground.
A couple of six inch flying leads soldered on and protruding from under the control plate allowed me to play with a whole bunch of capacitors with the bridge pu before rewiring anything.
This is the key bit. I found that 1 nanofarad (1000 picofarads) was just about right, subtly cutting the edge off but still leaving the high end. 2.5 nanofarads was way too much and starting to round off the sound. I found I couldn't hear any difference at all with values up to around 500 picofarads.
The rewiring consisted of breaking one cross terminal jump link; neck pu to shared switch input, and adding the cap to a non shared input tag. Very easy.
So there you are folks, it’s all in your own ear of course, and the pickups you’re using but it worked perfectly for me, tested at a gig that very night. I could ignore my tone control and snap from the front pu with all it’s top end to a slightly tamed bridge pu, to the ice pick if I’d wanted it (not really). It’s great to do a modification that doesn’t seem to have a downside.
Interested to hear what values anybody else has used for a similar mod.
As the 'energetic front man' in a band I don’t have time in the thick of things for tweaking tone controls, so I thought I’d have a go at solving the problem of taking the the edge off of the bridge pu, and making the instrument more useful to me at the same time.
I never play mid position with two pickups, as the result never seems worthwhile to my ears. I’d much rather get good sounds from the front and rear pickups individually. So I’ve rewired the pickup switch to; front and rear positions as standard, but the middle position is now bridge pu alone with a tuning capacitor to ground.
A couple of six inch flying leads soldered on and protruding from under the control plate allowed me to play with a whole bunch of capacitors with the bridge pu before rewiring anything.
This is the key bit. I found that 1 nanofarad (1000 picofarads) was just about right, subtly cutting the edge off but still leaving the high end. 2.5 nanofarads was way too much and starting to round off the sound. I found I couldn't hear any difference at all with values up to around 500 picofarads.
The rewiring consisted of breaking one cross terminal jump link; neck pu to shared switch input, and adding the cap to a non shared input tag. Very easy.
So there you are folks, it’s all in your own ear of course, and the pickups you’re using but it worked perfectly for me, tested at a gig that very night. I could ignore my tone control and snap from the front pu with all it’s top end to a slightly tamed bridge pu, to the ice pick if I’d wanted it (not really). It’s great to do a modification that doesn’t seem to have a downside.
Interested to hear what values anybody else has used for a similar mod.