Nearly every day, I receive a question like “I have a Custom Slender Flatoblaster with Fleemore Dunkin pickups. What brand and values of pots and capacitors should I buy to get a killer sound for Jazz Country Electro Fusion Metal Ambient Rockabilly?”
I’ve tried to be clear in my posts and videos evaluating guitar electronics, that these things are really subjective and a matter of personal preference. I could tell you that I like CTS brand EP0086 500k audio taper pots for both volume and tone, and Orange Drop 715P .01uF tone capacitors, and these work really well for me. But, you may buy these same components and hate them. More
This is an excellent article on guitar pickup magnets, how they work, magnet types and pickup construction, courtesy of Pete Biltoft at Vintage Vibe Guitars. Thanks Pete for the permission to post this here!
In addition to explaining the history and use of the various magnet types, this article also describes the differences in pickup construction between P-90’s, Fender-style single coils, blade pickups, and humbuckers.More
Following up on my previous post about humbucker wiring, here is a quick look at how humbuckers work, and how to split the coils and use parallel wiring.
A humbucker pickup is really just a a pair of single-coils, electrically out of phase and magnetically reversed from each other. The two coils are wired in series, and the end result is that electromagnetic hum/noise is phase-cancelled.
You may have heard this idea referred to as RWRP – Reverse Wound, Reverse Polarity. With a humbucker, one of the coils is RWRP relative to the other.
On many Stratocaster style guitars (three single coils), the middle single coil pickup is RWRP relative to the other two pickups. So when you blend the middle pickup with the neck or bridge pickup, you get the same kind of hum cancellation you get with a humbucker.
It is possible to wire up a humbucker with a switch to allow you to isolate (“tap”, or “split”) one of the coils, silencing the other coil. Listening to one of the coils in isolation will achieve more of a strat-type single coil sound.
You can also wire up the two humbucker coils in parallel instead of in series, which will sound more like a pair of single-coils on a strat, rather than a single humbucker. You’ll still get hum cancellation, but you’ll get less output power than the series wiring- a unique and useful voicing you might like.
You can go crazy making your guitar über-flexible with switches and push/pull pots to control series/parallel and splitting. Check out the the humbucker circuit diagrams at GuitarElectronics.com
I was interested to see that the guitar appears to have a standard MIDI port on the side, and will work as a MIDI controller outside the game.
It will be interesting to see how well this works for learning guitar, with the new Rock Band 3 “Pro” guitar mode. They say:
“Use the Squier by Fender Stratocaster Guitar and Controller in conjunction with Rock Band™ 3’s Trainer Modes to learn scales, chords, skills, drills and more.”
Today, let’s take a look at some really fancy boutique tone capacitors. You can hear these in the yesterday’s tone cap shootout.
The Luxe Grey Tiger is billed as “a faithful recreation of the famous Cornell-Dubilier Grey Tiger from 1956” and typically sells for about $40.
The Gibson Bumblebee is marketed as being “specially designed to replicate the original parts used by Gibson in the late 1950s”, and typically sells for over $100 for a 2-pack.
Have you ever wondered what special manufacturing and fabrication techniques they use to make these ultra-boutique capacitors?
Well, Steve over at Kernel of Wisdom has taken a knife to the little guys. And what have we here? Inside a Gibson Repro Bumblebee is really a Wesco polypropylene film cap, all wrapped up in black and stripes And inside a Luxe Grey Tiger, we find a General Instruments PIO cap.
Consider that a typical polypropylene film cap sells for maybe fifty cents. Gibson is selling this for about $50, so let’s see— that’s only a about a 10,000% markup 🙂
Here’s an interesting letter from 2004 about the reissue bumblebees from Edwin Wilson, Historic Program Manager at Gibson, as well as another tear-down of the reissue bumblebee.
This is not to say that these caps don’t sound good. However, what is clear to me (as if it wasn’t clear already) is that there is very little reason to spend this kind of money on a capacitor, unless you’ve got money to burn and it gives you warm fuzzies inside 🙂
In the ring this time are a Russian T-1 Teflon, Russian K4Y-9 PIO, Cornell-Dubilier PIO, Goodall PIO, Luxe Repro Grey Tiger, Gibson Repro Bumblebee, Sprague Vitamin Q, Jensen PIO, Sprague Orange Drop as well as a generic brown polyester film and ceramic disc caps.
He also has a blind comparison page (don’t peek at the answer key til after you listen).
Wow. Yesterday, I had a chance to play a session through a new Vox AC15C1. Really dynamic and responsive to play. Great character and presence, and a really nice break up when you dig in.
My usual session amp, a late-eighties solid-state Fender Stage 185, is increasingly unsatisfying to play- seems I can never find the right level of brightness in a band setting. Cranking up the presence, or tweaking the treble tends to make it harsh before it becomes pleasant. The clean channel is pretty nice, but the drive/boost channel tends to feel a bit fizzy.
Vox has just released a new hand-wired series, including the AC15HW1, pictured left. After my experience with the AC15C1, I’m anxious to hear whether the use of top-shelf components, hand wiring, tube rectifier, birch cabinet, ruby tubes, can make the already great sounding AC15 even better.
I also really like the ability to kick in extra gain with the new hot/cool foot switch, and the the OP mode switch to drop to 7.5W for nighttime playing.
The only things missing from the hand-wired series are the tremolo and reverb. One tune in yesterday’s session, Glen Phillips’ excellent laid back version of I Want A New Drug, calls for a bit of tremolo- but every time I tried kicking in the AC15C1’s trem, I just found it distracting and reached back to flick down the knob- perhaps I was just overdoing it, but I think I can probably live without it :) And while the AC15C1’s reverb is very warm, smooth and pleasant- I rarely use reverb. And I must say, if you turn the verb knob up over about 10%, it just sounds huuuuge, like you’re playing inside a water tower.
Warning- explicit photos follow:
Full disclosure- I work for Korg R&D, which owns Vox. So perhaps I’m a little biased towards Vox, over other alternatives (employee discount, woo-hoo!)
UPDATE 3/22/2011: I did eventually buy that AC15HW1, and it is a thing of beauty. I borrowed Chuck’s AC15C1 again and made a video comparing the two.
I often get asked how to decipher the colors on humbucker pickups, and how to wire them up. Different manufactures use different wire colors. Can’t we all just get along? 🙂
If your pickup doesn’t seem to match any of these color code charts, you can use the techniques described in this FAQ by Tim Stanley on identifying the wires using a multimeter.
Once you know which wire is North Start and Finish, and South Start and Finish, then you can refer to the humbucker circuit diagrams at GuitarElectronics.com. They have every variation imaginable, with coil tapping, push pulls, series/parallel, 3-way levers, 5-way levers, etc.
Here’s a typical Gibson wiring with 2 volume, 2 tone and a 3-way toggle switch:
Nearly every day, I receive a question like “I have a Custom Slender Flatoblaster with Fleemore Dunkin pickups. What brand and values of pots and capacitors should I buy to get a killer sound for Jazz Country Electro Fusion Metal Ambient Rockabilly?”
Here’s an interesting letter
