Instructional: Modifying your Pickups Tone

Greetings all,

   After rewiring my bridge humbucker to be in-phase (with my neck pickup) in the middle position, the bridge became exceptionally untameably bright.
(turned amp treble almost the full way off and it's still too bright)

Originally, The bridge pickup (SD SH-4-JB) was wired out of phase and completely backwards from how the SD wiring diagram specified. this was done by a guitar shop to allow the bridge pickup to play nicely with a "Kent Armstrong" pickup that was in the neck. (Tossed it I and installed a Charlie Christian instead)

I returned the bridge pickup wiring to SD-specs recently and removed the wires from the coil-split part of the volume pot (according to the SD diagrams for tele) and taped them together and tucked em away. After returning the bridge pickup wiring to SD-stock, the bridge pickup became "icepick-in-the-ear" bright and had extreme harmonic overtones...almost a chorusy sound. I tried lowering the bridge pickup to no avail, then lowering the treble side and raising the bass side but that just made it boomy.

At first I considered changing pickups but research into the issue led me to a better solution.
I figured there was something electronical that I could do to fix the issue.

The solution is much the same as taming the brightness of the overall guitar by adding a capacitor to the tone pot's connection to the volume pot and ground.

However, the difference lies in the fact that you put one leg of a capacitor in-line with the pickup's hot wire and ground the other leg to the pot/ground. I used Alligator-Clip Test leads from Radio-Shack to do my testing and then soldered in the winning cap after my testing was complete.

Here are a few videos of my test routine.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESOLaVyhkuY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nFWI7cIGzo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yH464zJC_iA

The 0.001nf capacitor seems to work the best. It takes the icepick highs off without muffling the sound and characteristics of the bridge pickup.

The 0.022 and 0.047 caps gave the bridge pickup too much of a "Wolly" sound...even with the tone pot turned all the way up and the treble on the amp turned all the way up.

The great thing about testing this way is that you can get a completely wide range of caps to test the tone with and even stack caps to produce in-between variances to lower or raise the treble levels in smaller increments. And all without soldering anything into your guitar until you find the right one.

Take care,
Dm