Getting a Dark Hollow Tone From A Solid Body Guitar- created 12-16-2008

Snyder, Craig - 12/16/2008.16:59:22
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I am a pro player/teacher who has a dislike of any type of trebly, snappy tones from a guitar. You would think after 35 years of playing my ears would attenuate these undesirable frequencies but that is not the case. I play several brands of guitars but they are basically all the same: 24 3/4 to 25.5 inch scale, set neck, mahogany body with maple cap, rosewood fingerboards,6 on-a-side headstocks, two series-wired humbuckers, no active electronics at all. I typically use Duncan JB's in the bridge and either a Duncan Jazz or a Dimarzio Air Norton in the neck position for pickups. I have tried going down to 250k audio taper CTS pots, 18 guage wire, etc.

My first thought is that a few of the pickups you mentioned are probably too powerful for the sound you want. I believe this is particularly true of the JB and Air Norton. I would try to find some low power pickups.

If you're not already doing so, you could try flatwound strings. They have perhaps the mellowest sound of any strings.

I think you need to switch to low output pickups too. But get away from the humbuckers, they are stifling your sound. I think you should try a single coil pickup, like the front pickup of a tele. They have much more character than what you are using

Same advice here. The JB, especially, is a pretty loud, bright-sounding pickup, and is not conducive to the sound you are trying to acheive ( I know because I use one sometimes). I don't know about Dimarzio but Seymour Duncan has sound clips from most of their pickups on their website, I think. Listen with a good set of headphones to clips of different pickups, that's how I've picked the ones I use. A good rule of thumb is to look at lower output "vintage-style" pickups to start

If you want lower than vintage try the Alnico pros. They're Alnico 2 mags and under wound. Lots of tone but less high end, with great bass

I second the recommendation on flat wound strings. That's where that smoky jazz tone comes from

CHEATER ALERT: Flatwounds, turn down the tone control and plug into a rackmount Parametric Equalizer.

Jim Mullen got a nice jazz sound out of a Telecaster, so anything is possible.

Craig,

You could probably find a Dimarzio super distortion pickup for cheap. Those certainly don't have any high end. Just keep your gain low.

Good luck.

Joshua

If you have ever had a three pickup guitar with all three pickups on and wired in parallel, it seems to produce a much darker sound. You can also get a darker sound by wiring two pick ups in series with each other (This might be what you are talking about in your original post). I also have a guitar that has a stacked P90 wired to a switch that puts those two coils in series, and that has a much darker sound than the typical humbucker.

If you are using expensive, pro quality cables, changing to cheaper ones might make a difference, believe it or not. I hear (I am too poor to spend more than the minimal amount on cables) that one of the selling points of expensive cables is higher fidelity i.e. less signal loss of the high frequencies. Reading some of your other modifications it sounds like high end frequency loss is what you are after.

Another vote for Telecaster neck pickups. The full metal cover adds a nice "blur" to the tone that's especially useful for jazz. You can use the tone control to further mellow it or you can wire a cap into the circuit to build in the mellow tone.

Ted Green was a master of mellow Tele tone. There are some YouTube examples, such as:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exJV8IpL7os&feature=related

I'm with Alan, at least in one way -- have you considered electronics external to the guitar(s), i.e., equalization? I'm just thinking it might be easier to use some easily-managed EQ to drop the 3k to 5k-ish region (where the pickup resonances tend to be, and also happens to be the nails-on-chalkboard part of the audio spectrum) rather than physical modifications to each instrument you play.

With all due respect to the various suggestions, all of which I'm assuming are valid in their own way, another way of looking at them is to think of them as attempts at altering the frequency response through various means... and we have relatively simple devices that do exactly that, but with simple and easily-tweaked controls. When I'm mixing live, I tweak the guitar's EQ in this upper-midrange region all the time, to either subdue it a little to keep it from burying the other sounds, or to bring it out "in your face", as appropriate for the moment.

Thanks for the suggestions so far on the attempt to achieve the darkest of tone. Bill Machrone suggests wiring a cap into the guitar's cicuitry-I am somewhat familiar with this but the question is-what value of capacitor/resistor and exactly how is this modification done? I need very specific instructions on this. I am quite handy with a soldering pencil and I have installed pickups and done basic guitar wiring for years.

<i> Do any of you have experience with the overall effect of

This won't really change anything soundwise.

<i>I also have a very specific question: how low in volume pot value can you go before you lose significant overall output and/or interfere with the guitar-to-amp input load? I know that a lower value pot attenuates highs but how low can you go?</i>

You can pretty much go as low as you want. At some point you will find that, the lower the pot value, the less output you will get. You can buy a bunch of resistors and stick them across the outside lugs of the volume pot to see what effect different values will have.

> I still insist on dropping the treble frequencies at the guitar, before the signal hits the amp. Why amplify unwanted frequencies only to attenuate them later? I don't mean for this last statement to sound snotty-logic tells me that reducing or cancelling these unwanted sounds would be more effective before the signal hits the amp's input.

A curious perspective. I would put the equalizer before the power amplifier, to be sure, and with a typical guitar amp, can't think of any place to put an equalizer except "before the signal hits the amp's input." Even so, there is no difference in apply a specific alteration of the frequency response anywhere in the signal chain -- the end is the same. The operation is, for all intents and purposes, commutative, because it is ultimately just a multiplication in the frequency domain, which you can do before, during, or after, with the same result.

Nevertheless, I am getting the impression that you enjoy tinkering with various modifications, and so I shall discontinue advocating what might be a perfectly viable, but not very fun, solution! <g>

I've always been able to get a nice, jazzy tone on a Tele by selecting the front pickup and dialing back the treble some. Works better if you have a humbucker in the front.

In response to Tom Clift's question regarding my guitar choices, there are several. My main instrument the past 2 and 1/2 years has been a J3 Pro 6- 24 fret 25.5 scale 6 string. ( J3 gtrs were marketed by the same company that distributed Aslin Dane but they halted production in early 2008). The J3 is a beautifaul guitar that initially had a retail price of 800 bucks. It was made in the same Korean factory where Brian Moore and Schecter axes were made. It has a solid mahogany body with a 1/2 inch carved maple top with flame 'burst finish. The neck is maple with a very high grade of rosewood for the 'board and is set into the body. The frets are akin to vintage Gibson in width and heigth. I installed a Duncan JB in the bridge and a Dimarzio Air Norton in the neck-both basic series wired humbuckers.The one and only volume pot is a CTS 250k audio taper. This is the axe I use for more rock-fusion gigs.

I'd like to return to the pickups you selected. I realize it may be too common a suggestion to recommend changing the type of pickups you are using, but I think it is important to look at the pickups you chose.

The Custom 5 is a fairly hot pickup. The Duncan website lists its DC resistance at 14.4K. The same website has its EQ at 6/3/8 (B/M/T).

If you decide to try other pickups, I'd suggest looking at ones in the vintage output range. By the way, I have the same problem with one of my guitars--an ebony board with a maple-capped body. The pickups in it are hotter than I would like, and my first choice to tame the tone would be to change the pickups to more vintage specs.

Here's the tone chart from Duncan's website:

http://www.seymourduncan.com/comparetones

I have a question for you. What size and type of strings are you using?

You might also want to try some Bartolini pickups, at least for the neck. Some models are smooth and mellow sounding

Hello again to all of you who have taken your valuable time to respond to the dark tone debacle. In response to Perry Underwood's comments on pickup choices: I have found that Duncan despite building great pickups is oftentimes way off on his desciptive adjectives on basic tone and output of certain pickups. You all know that DC resistance is one measure of a pickup's overall strength but that MAGNETIC structure and strength is an audible factor in pickup choice. The Duncan Jazz is smoother and more bass-y than a '59 or Alnico to my ears. I always avoided the Jazz because right on the pickup box the Jazz is described as clear and Bright in tone. A friend insisted that I try a Jazz Neck because that description is wrong and he was exactly correct. The Duncan Jazz is smooth as silk, has a buttery low end, and is medium in output. It is NOT bright and top-endy at all. I have found my neck pickup choice for life!

I'm not sure why you didn't just EQ the guitar to start with. Passive electronics can only do so much, including pickups.

I have a Duncan Jazz neck in a FirstAct Garagemaster, which has a basswood body and maple neck. I find it to be a very bright and twangy pickup, but it's a tad boomy, so I have to reduce the lows slightly to get rid of the mud. But it's not a dark sounding pickup.. it's bright and clear with a lot of lows. I much prefer the Air Norton for the neck.

David -- you're perhaps missing the point. It's not a problem to be solved, it's a problem to provide fuel for many hours interesting research and exploration into the wonderful world of the subtleties guitar tone. The fun is in the

:)

<i>I have accumulated five basic ways to wire a tone pot and they do affect the tone. </i>

Can you give a description of this wiring?

I'm not sure why you didn't just EQ the guitar to start with. Passive electronics can only do so much, including pickups.

EQ can't do everything, like even making more difference than the pickups themselves. EQ can't make a humbucker sound like a single-coil, for instance. I believe that EQ has its place, but if it was the "be-all-end-all" then we'd all have the same pickups and just have EQ boxes that we all played through.

>It's not a problem to be solved, it's a problem to provide fuel for many hours interesting research and exploration into the wonderful world of the subtleties guitar tone.

I already know how to get tones from pickups. It would have been pretty easy to make a pickup with a dark tone. Look at the neck pickup on an old Gibson EB-0 bass. But none of the pickups you mentioned are dark sounding, so EQ is your best friend in that situation.

I'm more interested in getting the widest tone from pickups, not taking away tone. But with EQ you could have dialed in your tone in a few minutes.

I'm all for exploring different tones... that why I started winding my own pickups. <g>

>EQ can't make a humbucker sound like a single-coil, for instance.

If you have a bright enough humbucker, you sure can use EQ to sound like a single coil.. listen to Tuck Andress. That's a Bartolini humbucker with a ton of EQ. Sounds exactly like a single coil. And it's pretty easy to make a single coil sound like a humbucker. It's all about the EQ curve of the pickup, and the resonant peak.

If this instance though EQ would have been a way to get to the end results. The reason it's hard to get a humbucker to sound like a single coil is due to the high frequency cancelation. You can't add what's not there, but you sure can take it away, which is what was wanted here... a dark sounding pickup.

The real way to get a dark sounding pickup is to increase the inductance and eddy currents, and wind a butt load of wire. But he was going with commonly available pickups.

you sure can use EQ to sound like a single coil

Well, that will always be a matter of debate that we won't solve here. I stand by what I said though, that EQ would not satisfy everyone, in fact not most.

I'm not sure EQ has been given a fair chance in this particular circumstance. You can't do everything with an equalizer, no, but you can do a whole lot if you learn how to use it, and some things are actually fairly simple. I think the interesting technical point is that the vast majority of solutions people have suggested are, when you boil it down, one way or another of altering the frequency response. The techniques that are... not exactly "random," but certainly in the "not easily controlled" category, generally sort of ad-hoc in nature. Altering the number of winds, for example, does two things: change the overall output level (which is technically irrelevant), and alter the frequency response of the filter that the coil is an inherent part of. The inductance and capacitance of the coil change, and thus so does the filter circuit's response. That's basically it -- level and EQ -- and there's no reason you couldn't do pretty much the same thing with a good equalizer. Similarly most of the other solutions.

Both "dark" and "hollow" are easily achieved by carving out parts of the spectrum, a simple and easy thing to do with a good equalizer. The EQ solution would apply to any and all guitars under consideration, could be easily tuned and tweaked into a gloriously satisfying solution, all in a simple and easily-transferable way.

For some reason, EQ has been rejected as a viable option, but I might suggest that that reason is not legitimately technical in nature. Even just

However, my sense is that what makes Craig happy is the quest; learning about "stuff" and how it all works together in a guitar. Nothing wrong with that -- this

I hope I haven't been offensive; I don't mean to be, but I know that, particularly when my blood sugar is low, I can be inflammatory without hardly trying.

You make some good points, and from my end I'll accept my part. It does have its place, and I was talking about my own experience and outlook on it. I think it's always best to go for simplicity, and keeping anything I don't need out of the signal chain. So sorry if I shot down anyones' suggestions, and mean my opinions to help clarify what can be a complicated thing