Rewiring for Resonant Peak Shift & Mid Scoop

[Sascha Franck]

I think that it goes the other way: it is faster and less complicated to tweak EQ blocks than to rewire your guitar and conduct all the experimentation combining different components.

No. It'd only be faster initially. In the long run it's incredibly cumbersome because you would have to program pickup scenarios into each preset.

 

[Piing]

You really can't reproduce the load on a passive pickup with an active EQ; at least I haven't figured out how to make them sound the same. In this case, where I get an unlistenable pick attack I've tried to EQ that out, but I couldn't figure out a way without just getting rid of the high end altogether. I've tried every kind of Q and cut depth, but it just sounded awful.

What I'm doing here is a different thing altogether; I'm actually shifting the resonant peak of the pickup itself, getting it to act like a different pickup. It's the basic character of the pickup that changes. You can move the resonant peak up or down just by placing a cap in series or parallel, respectively. You lower the peak with a resistor. The effect is truly like a pickup swap, although with no change in coil wind; when I finally did it correctly, realizing parallel meant one leg of the cap goes to the hot lead and the other to ground, that was like a revelation to me.

An EQ can't change the resonant peak. You can try a version of this just by going though the different input impedances of the Axe-FX III input block plugging in to the front input. You'll hear how the different values load your pickup. I actually created a wishlist for the next hardware version to allow for a fine control of this feature to load the guitar not for recreating the input impedances of gear, but to change the character of the guitar itself.

It's what Hendrix did by using an extra long cable, which lowered the resonant peak of his pickups with a bunch of capacitance, I assume to get rid of bridge ice pick tones.

Then we shall dream with Cliff adopting Roland V-Guitar modeling technology, so we can swap pickups as easily as we swap CAB IRs

 

[State of Epicicity]

Then we shall dream with Cliff adopting Roland V-Guitar modeling technology, so we can swap pickups as easily as we swap CAB IRs

This is the wishlist thread, for what it's worth:

Wish - Axe-FX IV Feature: Variable Pickup Loading from Input

Okay, I know the use of volume and tone knobs on the guitar becomes less necessary when you have pedals that can control so much; however, there is a wonderful effect from the way pickups are loaded by different pot and cap values. What I purpose is from there to be a way, at the very input of...

forum.fractalaudio.com

 

[State of Epicicity]

I've now wired in the two humbucker tones with their resonant peak shifts. I'll now reroute the wiring so that I can go between three tones: the downshifted bridge and neck, and the neck unaltered. The neck unaltered in this context means the hot lead from the neck in series just loaded by a trimpot. I'll measure the actual dual gang that I want to use in the end and get the trimpot itself to be close the dual gang's value. Anyway, the raw signal is going to be part of the unkown for me; I'll use it to figure out what kind of EQ would sound best, that is, I'm going to dial in very basic mid scoops in the PEQ block of the Axe-FX III with a boosted peak at the top to figure out what my target frequencies are.

But, I ride my volume knobs a lot, especially for single coil type tones, so I need to make sure that I have a treble bleed I like for this testing, so the next step is to take the neck humbucker hot lead in series, with no peak shifting at all, and test for the treble bleed I like best with it. That takes a different diagram:

I'll then let ChatGPT know my neck pickup's inductance and resitance, as well as the values of all the inductors (the audio signal transformers) I have, and I'll ask what would be the best ones to try, with what value caps, as a ballpark value to start testing. Then I'll start mid scoop testing!

Man, this is taking fucking forever, but the tonal results are fucking worth it so far. I obsess so much over tone I can't get past it when a guitar sounds like shit. To me the point of guitar playing is to communicate good tone in an artistic way! So every bit of analysis and real world testing I do pays off, even if all I want to do is plug in a fucking play, and I'm losing my mind waiting to do just that!

 

[State of Epicicity]

Oops, forgot to add the loading trimpot for the unshifted neck:

 

[State of Epicicity]

This is getting to be a lot of trimpots haha! Thank God they exist. What a space saver, and what a way to be able to dial in exactly what the fuck you need. I'll tell you this; I know part of what you pay for with high end makers like Anderson, people in those leagues, is a guitar that will just sound great off the bat. I'm sure those shops are picking out wood for whatever it is that makes a guitar resonant in the right ways, so you can just plug in and you have something great off the bat. But that's not what I get. It's a lottery, as everyone reading this I'm sure knows all too well. When I bought my Epiphone Les Paul in the aughts I tried about 30 of them, Gibson and Epiphone, until I found one in the lottery of wood that just sang naturally. It was a thing of beauty to behold its tone. But here I chose this guitar because it felt great and had the features I wanted at the time. I didn't do extensive tone testing, and that was a mistake. But one big feature I wanted at that time was stainless steel frets, because I wear down nickel silver too damn quickly, and there was almost no one making them affordably at that time, so this was the best option. Now there so incredibly more common, I would just drive to Milwaukee or Chicago and try dozens of guitars in person until one hit me just right.

But, I'll tell you, to me, resonant peak shifting is the next best thing. I love, love, love the way my guitar feels, and shifting the resonant peak downward mitigates 95% of what I don't like, and the rest I can cover with careful playing technique. That's fine.

And in for a penny, in for a pound. If I'm already doing all this shit, I may as well try to accomplish my longtime dream of getting Les Paul and noiseless Strat tones out of the same guitar. I think I may be able to do this, if I can just keep going with my testing. Wish me luck!