How do you tame an overly hot humbucker?

strtdv

ChuckManual said:

It was a joke.

At least, I hope it was.

Just in case, I'm putting my guitar in the freezer to see what happens...

Sorry, I missed that.

In theory it could work, certainly repeated exposure to extremes of heat and cold (ie an oven vs a freezer) cause magnets to demagnetise.

zepp76

You don't tame it, you play the shit out of it!

hubobulous

Change the pickups. Seriously.

It sounds like you're trying to make them imitate medium output pickups, so just bite the bullet and swap.

From experience of both high and medium output pickups, (as I'm sure a lot of us here have), they are different beasts and you might simply find that your ear, or playing style prefers medium output.

chrishill901

ChuckManual;56031" said:

It sounds really good with the volume backed-off, but I keep knocking it and nice smooth overdrive turns into totally deafening arsequake in the blink of an eye.

Would replacing the 500k volume pot with a 250k work?

For me the rough and ready to achieve this would be to have a passive attenuator pedal like this little guy for £25

https://www.vein-tap.com/product/the-leech-guitar-attenuator/

Basically its like having a footswitchable guitar volume. Stick your guitar volume on full, dial the volume back on the pedal to match the tone you wanted with the guitar volume and just always leave the pedal on. The full guitar volume pot is still available to roll back to clean, but when you whack it on 10 it will go back to the tone you want as the passive pedal will be throttling the output. Make sure it is first in the pedal chain to mimick it being the pot on the guitar and blamo! No need for expensive pickup swaps! And if you ever need a bit more grunt for a guitar solo just stomp on that badboy and you have your original unaltered hot as hell tone.


OR!!! Learn to not knock the volume on your guitar and you have all of the above tonal possibilities available with a single touch.