Neck pickup reversing a quick mod to get a brighter tone ?

[TonyB56]

I go on 58 years playing experience and advice from a top jazz guitarist now deceased. As for the moron remark anyone who thinks lining the slots up on the slugs affects the magnetic field deserves the term. I purely offered some advice based on experience, no one has to believe it or act on it that's their prerogative.

[PTChristopher2]

Hi Tony,

I understand. I find that despite significant longevity in working on guitars, I learn something new (and often drop an old widely-held view) simply by measuring something. Someone brand new to guitars would learn the same thing from the measurement. So maybe my longevity is never worth prancing out as an important part of an opinion.

I share your view about the insignificance of lining up screw slots. In my opinion, there are many similarly-unlikely views on guitar adjustment that do not readily attract derision. It's weird.

[uburoibob]

Late to the party, (too late in fact!) but if you unscrew the adjustable pole pieces on a humbucker you are left with just the concealed ones 'reading' the strings and that will give a brighter more single coil sound. If you decide its not for you, just reinsert the adjustable polepieces and you are back to stock. I read somewhere that Johnny Smith used to do this with his personal JS floating pickups to get a brighter sound. Wish I could remember where I read it!

Absolutely. I've done this recently. Essentially, the coil that you took the pole pieces out of becomes a dummy coil, so that it retains the humbucking effect. But the pickup it self sounds much more like a Telecaster pickup. VERY hi-fi. I couldn't believe the difference and decided to get some nylon 5-40 x 3/8" screws to fill the empty holes.

And it makes a very BIG difference when you rotate the modded pickup 180 degress.

Best free mod I ever did to my guitar.

Bob

[PTChristopher2]

>>> the coil that you took the pole pieces out of becomes a dummy coil

Hi Bob,

After seeing an Alembic guitar in the late 70's I fooled around with dummy coils.

Like you, I found that it could sound great with the dummy coil rather close to the magnetised coil.

I suppose the original idea is to get the dummy far away, for a sort of magnetic isolation. But I found the same thing you did regarding a "hi-fi" aspect to the sound with the dummy pretty much as close as possible. Maybe not for everyone, but I thought it sounded great.

Chris

[PTChristopher2]

Thinking about the moronic (so to speak) screw slot orientation:

If anything, you do best to set the slots perpendicular to the strings.

Perpendicular not only awakens the magnetic chakras, but if the PU is quite close to the string it prevents the very rare, but moronic, condition where the high E can get stuck in the screw slot.

[Jimmy Mack]

Glad to see some humor coming to the fore!!!

I've messed with my p/ups quite a lot, and think I know a thing or a thing and a half, but I never tried, never heard of for that matter, unscrewing the pole pieces completely! I always rely on them for balancing string volumes, as the other distinguished poster mentioned. I even do that on my Stratocasters!!!!

And I too often learn new things, but, I read most of them here, on the internet. / \ / \ / \ Really now?

[PTChristopher2]

Hiya Jimmy,

>>> never heard of for that matter, unscrewing the pole pieces completely!

Yeah, sounds weird and pretty much not something that is commonly usable for most players - in my opinion.

But for laughs:

Consider a single coil PU. You gots your signal and you gots your hum.

Now make a coil wound in the opposite direction (or in any case "out of phase") vs. the PU's single coil.

Now glue that coil on the guitar so it oriented in the same direction as the PU coil, but is not next to the PU coil. (Alembic placed the dummy coil between the two PU's, so quite far away since magnetic force falls off VERY quickly with distance.)

If you then wire this "dummy" coil in parallel with the PU, it will be a hum generator (from ambient AC hum), but this hum will be 180 deg. out of phase with the PU's hum - this canceling the hum to a significant extent.

(Now the dummy coil also affects the response/resonance of the RLC circuit, but let's leave that out for now.)

Removing the screws from one side of an HB PU does the same thing as adding a dummy coil to a single coil PU, with the twist of placing this now "dummy" coil within some influence of the magnetic field from the other coils slugs and the underlying bar magnet.

(This dummy coil is also wired in series with the other coil, so the effect on RLC resonance is different.)

So now the screw-less (or pole-piece-less) coil generates much less string signal, but still bucks the hum. I suggest we call this modified dummy coil a "Moronic Coil",...

It is a fun experiment home science, and easily reversible of course.

Chris