Treble bleed or 500k pots?

djspecialist

I was playing around the other day with cleaning up by backing off the guitar volume, and found it would get quite muddy.  My Yamaha SG2000 has stock pickups and stock 300k volume + tone pots. I had the tone on 10, which on these pots is a no load setting.

Should I try a treble bleed, and if so what values should I go for?  Alternatively, would replacing the pots with 500k help?

dogload

Keep it stock and chuck a 0.001 mF capacitor on the volume

p90fool

How is it wired? Is it independent volumes, where rolling one to zero in the middle position leaves the other pickup on, or does rolling one off shut down the whole guitar? 

If it's the former it'll get very muddy and I'd start by rewiring it, if it's the latter I like 470pf cap on the neck volume and a 330pf on the bridge, or use no cap at all on the bridge and wire it 50s style instead.  

ICBM

I would go for either a treble-pass cap or 50s wiring. 500K pots will make the treble loss *worse*, not better - the sound will be brighter at full-up, and lose as much or slightly more treble as you roll down. It will also make the coil-split tone (if it has them) too shrill.

The best treble-pass cap value for humbuckers is 680pF, in my experience - although it does vary depending on the pickups and the cable you use.

SunDevil

+1 for the 680pF - Suhr use this with a 150k resistor in parallel for the standard treble bleed and I can't fault it with either Humbuckers or Single Coils

ICBM

SunDevil said:

+1 for the 680pF - Suhr use this with a 150k resistor in parallel for the standard treble bleed and I can't fault it with either Humbuckers or Single Coils

And at the total opposite end of the spectrum, Fender use it with a 220K resistor in parallel, with a Seymour Duncan Invader on the Tom Delonge Strat .

djspecialist

p90fool said:

How is it wired? Is it independent volumes, where rolling one to zero in the middle position leaves the other pickup on, or does rolling one off shut down the whole guitar?

Rolling off either volume shuts off the output. Does that mean it already has 50s wiring?

ICBM said:

500K pots will make the treble loss *worse*, not better - the sound will be brighter at full-up, and lose as much or slightly more treble as you roll down. It will also make the coil-split tone (if it has them) too shrill.

It does indeed have coil splits, and the sound when everything is on 10 is already bright enough (in both split and full-HB modes).

From the responses above, values between 330pF and 1000pF have been suggested - with / without a resistor in parallel.  Sounds like I may have some experimenting to do...

ICBM

djspecialist said:

Rolling off either volume shuts off the output. Does that mean it already has 50s wiring?

No, but it does mean it has the standard Gibson-style wiring so that isn't contributing to the treble loss. 50s wiring means moving the tone control connection to the middle terminal of the volume control (rather than the top) but it won't make any difference when the tones control are full up, since they're no-load. It will make a difference if the tone controls are below full.

djspecialist

Thanks @ICBM ;

I'm thinking this mod may be a good opportunity to replace some of the wiring.  I previously inserted resistors into the coil split connections to ground, to make them partial coil splits - while I'm very happy with the resulting sound, the job wasn't as neatly done as I'd like  

What kind of cable would you recommend?  I read somewhere that Yamaha used a very low capacitance cable which gave a brighter tone.  While my OP was about reducing treble loss when turning down the volume, I'd actually be happy with a slightly warmer tone with everything on ten.  Is there a particular spec / brand of cable which is typically used in LP wiring?

ICBM

I think it's unlikely the cable capacitance makes that much difference over such a short run - even accounting for it going up to the switch and back it only adds a total of a couple of feet at most - but the standard for quality humbucker-guitar wiring is cloth-insulated braided cable as used on vintage Gibsons, so I would always use that as a default if there's no specific reason not to.

I think the brightness of these guitars is more a function of the construction, the pickups and the no-load tone pots.