State of Epicicity
Shredder
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My goal for some time now has been to be able to go between single coil Strat and humbucker Les Paul tones without the drawbacks of introducing hum nor massively dropping output. I just wanted to point to my experience, because I've found little written about this potential for mid cuts specifically. I'm distilling what I've learned from my long running rewiring project, since that thread is convoluted and deals with several other ideas not relevant to this topic.
I had tried series / parallel switching, which keeps the humbucking property but drops the output so much and comb filters the single coil sparkle away. I had considered trying a Lace Dually, a Kinman Converge-3, a ZexCoil Tribucker, a Humless-H out of Poland, a JBE Two-Tone, or a Dual Mode EMG, all of which are designed to go between humbucker tones to the tone of a noiseless split. I had even considered installing a noiseless Strat pickup next to a single coil sized humbucker with a thin piece of rubber between them and wrapping them together tightly to avoid disruptive vibrations.
Instead, what I did have on hand was a parametric equalizer, and I found that I could create really good single coil emulations just by playing a loop of my humbucker in series in the Axe-FX III and carving out a big scoop around 250Hz, boosting a shelf below that and a peak around 5kHz. The drawback was, even with the best treble bleed, if I fine tuned it to low volume knob settings it would sound like shit at 10, and vice versa. I created many PEQ block library single coil emulations, but I couldn't get them to translate with the sweep of my volume knob.
Meanwhile I had read about the Bill Lawrence / Wilde Pickups Q-Filter, but people didn't really talk about it in the context of getting a single coil tone out of a humbucker. I had also found some written about the Torres and Rothstein Mid Cuts, though only the Rothstein is still sold, and I found the mid cut circuits of KellingSound88 on eBay, who has an extensive offering.
I decided finally to try a passive mid cut of my own, but targeted to what my guitar would need to get a convincing single coil Strat tone out of my humbucker. Why not just keep trying with a parametric EQ alone? I've done some testing between losing a pickup with resistors and caps to change its frequency response and EQing it, and the loading always just sounded softer and easier on the ears. For a simple comparison, just compare your tone nob to a 1st order high cut on parametric EQ.
Now, my guitar is by nature brighter than bright, no matter what dark and powerful humbuckers I install, so I shifted the resonant peak downward for Les Paul type tones, but to stimulate a Strat my overly bright guitar was already in a good place: I used the basic bright tone of my humbucker with no shift at all to find the ideal mid scoop via parametric EQ. The difference here was to try to keep it simple, just a single frequency scoop, and quickly I found that targeting 851Hz balanced perfectly with my humbucker. With the Keep It Simple, Stupid principle of targeting one frequency for a scoop rather than using various bands of cutting and boosting, I found the single coil emulation worked convincingly through the entire sweep of the volume knob.
I recorded that what I liked was a scoop of 851Hz, reduced by 12.61dB, with a Q of .831, and I had measured my pickup to have an inductance of 4.18H and a resistance of 7.51K. Over time I've also accumulated various capacitor, fixed resistor, and trimpot kits, very inexpensively.
The crucial factor were the inductors. In order to create a passive mid cut, you need an inductor as well as a cap and a resistor. Inductors come in different forms, but what I discovered from forum posts was that the ones most appropriate for this application are small audio signal transformers. I posted about some sources for those here:
The keys are size and high inductance. I had bought several different ASTs, since these are also inexpensive.
Now I entered my pickup specs, target mid scoop, the caps I have on hand, and the inductance I measured of my various ASTs to ChatGPT, and it gave me a couple of options for how wire the scoop suggesting which AST to wire, which caps to combine, and where to set a trimpot. I tried one of the options, and right away it worked beautifully, truly just as I had hoped.
Since this has been a goal of mine for many years now, I felt compelled to share what I found in a dedicated thread, should others share my goals. I finally achieved something I thought might have been impossible, and I'd love to have found this info distilled this way years ago.
One more application I think I'll try: in my mitigation of the over-brightness of my guitar, I still find a tiny bit of harsh pick attack in my bridge Les Paul style tone. I may use a very targeted high mid cut to get rid of the last bit using this same method!
I had tried series / parallel switching, which keeps the humbucking property but drops the output so much and comb filters the single coil sparkle away. I had considered trying a Lace Dually, a Kinman Converge-3, a ZexCoil Tribucker, a Humless-H out of Poland, a JBE Two-Tone, or a Dual Mode EMG, all of which are designed to go between humbucker tones to the tone of a noiseless split. I had even considered installing a noiseless Strat pickup next to a single coil sized humbucker with a thin piece of rubber between them and wrapping them together tightly to avoid disruptive vibrations.
Instead, what I did have on hand was a parametric equalizer, and I found that I could create really good single coil emulations just by playing a loop of my humbucker in series in the Axe-FX III and carving out a big scoop around 250Hz, boosting a shelf below that and a peak around 5kHz. The drawback was, even with the best treble bleed, if I fine tuned it to low volume knob settings it would sound like shit at 10, and vice versa. I created many PEQ block library single coil emulations, but I couldn't get them to translate with the sweep of my volume knob.
Meanwhile I had read about the Bill Lawrence / Wilde Pickups Q-Filter, but people didn't really talk about it in the context of getting a single coil tone out of a humbucker. I had also found some written about the Torres and Rothstein Mid Cuts, though only the Rothstein is still sold, and I found the mid cut circuits of KellingSound88 on eBay, who has an extensive offering.
I decided finally to try a passive mid cut of my own, but targeted to what my guitar would need to get a convincing single coil Strat tone out of my humbucker. Why not just keep trying with a parametric EQ alone? I've done some testing between losing a pickup with resistors and caps to change its frequency response and EQing it, and the loading always just sounded softer and easier on the ears. For a simple comparison, just compare your tone nob to a 1st order high cut on parametric EQ.
Now, my guitar is by nature brighter than bright, no matter what dark and powerful humbuckers I install, so I shifted the resonant peak downward for Les Paul type tones, but to stimulate a Strat my overly bright guitar was already in a good place: I used the basic bright tone of my humbucker with no shift at all to find the ideal mid scoop via parametric EQ. The difference here was to try to keep it simple, just a single frequency scoop, and quickly I found that targeting 851Hz balanced perfectly with my humbucker. With the Keep It Simple, Stupid principle of targeting one frequency for a scoop rather than using various bands of cutting and boosting, I found the single coil emulation worked convincingly through the entire sweep of the volume knob.
I recorded that what I liked was a scoop of 851Hz, reduced by 12.61dB, with a Q of .831, and I had measured my pickup to have an inductance of 4.18H and a resistance of 7.51K. Over time I've also accumulated various capacitor, fixed resistor, and trimpot kits, very inexpensively.
The crucial factor were the inductors. In order to create a passive mid cut, you need an inductor as well as a cap and a resistor. Inductors come in different forms, but what I discovered from forum posts was that the ones most appropriate for this application are small audio signal transformers. I posted about some sources for those here:
The keys are size and high inductance. I had bought several different ASTs, since these are also inexpensive.
Now I entered my pickup specs, target mid scoop, the caps I have on hand, and the inductance I measured of my various ASTs to ChatGPT, and it gave me a couple of options for how wire the scoop suggesting which AST to wire, which caps to combine, and where to set a trimpot. I tried one of the options, and right away it worked beautifully, truly just as I had hoped.
Since this has been a goal of mine for many years now, I felt compelled to share what I found in a dedicated thread, should others share my goals. I finally achieved something I thought might have been impossible, and I'd love to have found this info distilled this way years ago.
One more application I think I'll try: in my mitigation of the over-brightness of my guitar, I still find a tiny bit of harsh pick attack in my bridge Les Paul style tone. I may use a very targeted high mid cut to get rid of the last bit using this same method!
