335-style guitars tend to be deceptively "bright" overall, in my experience. Not what
we tend to expect, though.
Well, the neck pickup sounds great and warm - but it does have quite some brilliance/presence to it, too. Which is pretty nice once you do funky stuff and such.
The "brightness" isn't exactly my issue, anyway, it's really the higher mids coming through the bridge pickup. Those are defenitely there on the neck pickup, too - but in that case they help nicely to cut through and still do so even when you dial down the tone pot a bit.
It took me a loooooong time to finally realize “oh, that’s just what they sound like. My idea that hollow = warm is the faulty part of this”
Yeah, sort of guity as charged. Always thought that jazz boxes would be rather "warm", too (well, at least 2-3 decades ago...), but when you listen to old recordings, there's plenty of "sheen" on the guitars. What made them sound warm is likely a combination of neck pickup, amp and playing.
Which is also why the typical faux jazz sound of using pretty much any guitar, any neck pickup and then dial down the tone pot to some degree never sounds "authentic" at all. The real "wooden character" only comes through when there's a healthy amount of treble and high mids.
Just that those result in the bridge pickup choice to become an issue, even more so once the bridge pickup is close to the bridge.
Guess it had to take Malcolm Young to demonstrate how "sort-of-jazz-box-looking" things were actually great for some serious riffing.
Anyhow, I actually remember watching a video of someone who apparently had Gibson made a custom 335 (I absolutely don't remember whom it was, maybe
@Eagle knows more) - and what they did was placing the bridge pickup around a centimeter closer to the neck.
This is actually something I considered for my Ibanez, as years of experimenting with pickup positions on my own demonstrated just how much of a difference such rather small differences can cause.
But then, if I would really go that way, I'd want it to be done properly - which would cost quite some money. So I rather fool around with the pickups and electrics first.
My assumption is that pots are the biggest contributer to bright/not so bright, and would investigate that first
I will defenitely rip out the electrics somewhen in the next weeks (2 gigs to go before where I really want to use the guitar). I will then extend the pickup cables and build the entire circuit on a piece of cardboard. As said, I also want to fool around with a rotary c-switch, which always is a trial'n'error thing.
Btw, I actually thought about having a luthier cut me some part of the back out, so I'd have easy access to the electrics, but I fear to lose some acoustic properties. What would you say,
@Eagle?