No Tone Pot on a Neck Humbucker

Ddigger

Twin humbucker guitar, only 3 controls (like an Gibson Explorer).

Trouble with a muddy sounding neck humbucker.

Explorer style wiring has the single tone pot after the 3 way toggle switch.

Any downside to wiring the Bridge Humbucker to the single tone pot like a Les Paul (tone pot connected tot he center lug on the bridge humbucker volume pot) and wiring the neck humbucker directly to the switch.

I can't see a need to every cut the treble this heck humbucker and having no tone pot will make the neck slightly brighter.

Surely the pickup loading will be different in an Explorer as the single tone pot will load down both volume pots.

Thanks

paulnb57

My Tokai LP is wired with 3 controls, 2 vol 1 tone, the tone pot I wired to the bridge vol pot, no neck tone, both vol pots to the switch, switch to jack, no idea if it brightens the neck pickup as I bought the neck and body as a carcass and when I wired it I wanted the switch with the pots so put the switch in the neck tone pot position..you could try 50's wiring as that's allegedly a bit brighter...

Dave_Mc

Only downside I can think of (assuming it works electrically! I'm a bit dim at this stuff) is that you might not like how it sounds. I remember a good while back I accidentally disconnected the tone pot from the neck humbucker in my Edwards LP (as a result of some shoddy soldering) and I didn't really like the sound. It just didn't sound quite right, especially considering the bridge humbucker still had a tone pot connected.

But no tone pot should brighten it a bit. Whether that'll fix the muddiness, though, I'm not sure. There's some other trick wiring (you'll have to google it, I've never tried it and don't know exactly what it is offhand) where you can use a capacitor to cut some lows on a neck humbucker, that might work better (but I've never tried it). EDIT: Found it, according to Seymour Duncan you wire a .047 (they don't specify but I'm guessing uF?) cap to the end of the pickup's hot wire, and then wire the other end of the cap to where the pickup's hot wire should go (volume pot or switch). They seemed to be saying the effect was pretty subtle, though.

I don't think 50s wiring will make any difference, at least if the volumes are up full.

goldtop

Agreed - I hardly ever dial down the Tone on an LP's neck humbucker.

I'm tempted to take one of my LPs and wire it for Vol / Vol / Treble / Bass. One of these days...

ICBM

Ddigger said:

Twin humbucker guitar, only 3 controls (like an Gibson Explorer).

Trouble with a muddy sounding neck humbucker.

Explorer style wiring has the single tone pot after the 3 way toggle switch.

Any downside to wiring the Bridge Humbucker to the single tone pot like a Les Paul (tone pot connected tot he center lug on the bridge humbucker volume pot) and wiring the neck humbucker directly to the switch.

I can't see a need to every cut the treble this heck humbucker and having no tone pot will make the neck slightly brighter.

Surely the pickup loading will be different in an Explorer as the single tone pot will load down both volume pots.

No problem at all. It doesn’t change the overall loading because the tone control isn’t a resistance to ground, it goes via the cap.

I would connect the tone to the pickup terminal not the middle (ie modern wiring) on the bridge volume control, which will also make the neck pickup brighter in the middle position when the bridge volume is turned down a bit.

Ddigger

goldtop said:

Agreed - I hardly ever dial down the Tone on an LP's neck humbucker.

I'm tempted to take one of my LPs and wire it for Vol / Vol / Treble / Bass. One of these days...

I did that mod on a Vintage brand LP.  I used the diagram on page 313 of the Complete Guitar Wiring by Gerry Hayes.

I used a 500K pot first time and then went with a 1M pot.  You can hear the difference if full off or full on, I doesn't sound like much if you try and roll it down.  If you have some heavy fuzz, it can help to clarify things.

GandL do the "correct" pot, but never seem to have it in stock and I am not sure how much difference it would make.

https://g-l-online-store.myshopify.com/products/split-shaft-potentiometer-tribute-series-guitar

Ddigger

Thanks for all the tips.

I need to draw these ideas up and look at the wiring runs.

MartinB

goldtop said:

Agreed - I hardly ever dial down the Tone on an LP's neck humbucker.

I'm tempted to take one of my LPs and wire it for Vol / Vol / Treble / Bass. One of these days...

I did this on a 335 copy, and quite liked it. It doesn't necessarily get brighter with the bass down, but if you're running into an amp or pedal that's breaking up just a little, it cleans up in a good way when you roll the bass cut back, with less drop in loudness than doing it from the volume pot.

The other thing I quite liked to clear up a neck humbucker was keeping the overall pickup height quite low with the adjustable poles set high.