Esquire wiring in reverse - can it be done ?

[SlowGroove]

I have an idea of doing the same (well kinda) with a guitar simmilar to the one below, but, instead of thickenning the sound of a typical Esquire in pos #3, to create a bassier neck-like pu sound, can it be done in reverse ?

Making the 3rd pos on a neck pu guitar like this more trebly, to simmulate a bridge pu ?
If you can add bass to a single coil bridge pu, surely you can (w the same method) add treb to a neck pu, not so ?
Just an i dea.




All ideas very welcome.



James

[jeremy]

you arent adding anything, only taking away. but yes you can roll off bass

[Funkfingers]

you arent adding anything, only taking away. but yes you can roll off bass

This is what the third slider switch on a Fender Jaguar does. It is a simple passive high pass (effectively, bass cut) filter.

[SlowGroove]

you arent adding anything, only taking away. but yes you can roll off bass

This is what the third slider switch on a Fender Jaguar does. It is a simple passive high pass (effectively, bass cut) filter.

Thanks guys . . . so i can get a bridge-like tone from the neck then !?



James

[MikeS]

Bridge like? Probably not, but it is possible to roll off the low end for a brighter tone. You could convert a tone pot to a bass roll-off (G&L style) or you could use a resistor and capacitor with a switch.

[ParameterMan]

Thanks guys . . . so i can get a bridge-like tone from the neck then !?



James

Kinda. Not really. Each pickup's sound comes from the area of the string it's sensing, so if you suck the bass out of the neck pickup it'll sound like a thinner neck pickup. To my ear, the Esquire wiring suffers from the same thing-- the 'neck' setting sounds like a wooly bridge pickup.

You might be able to experiment with small capacitors in parallel with the pickup to change it's resonant frequency to more of a midrange squawk, in addition to the bass cut.

Anyway, here's how high and low pass filters work: capacitors block frequencies below their own resonant frequency. Or you could say they let through frequencies that are above a certain point.

So a traditional guitar tone control(a low-pass filter) connects hot to ground through a cap and a variable resistor(pot). When the pot is on 0, it's effectively out of the circuit and the cap allows the highs straight through to ground, where they die a quick and painless death.

A high-pass consists of a cap directly in the signal path. So if you pick the right value cap, it lets only the highs and mids through and blocks the bass. If you wire a variable resistor as a bypass around the cap, you can control how much bass gets around it.

Aaaand, a midrange resonance consists of a capacitor in parallel with an inductor. Guitar pickups qualify as an inductor, so when your tone control is on 0, the cap and pickup are free to resonate together. That's why most tone controls change character completely when all the way down. Also the secret to the classic "woman tone" where you use a smaller value cap than normal; it changes the pickup's resonant peak to somewhere in the midrange instead of the low end.

So then, my wild-hair speculation would be to run a small cap(about half the woman tone value) to ground through a bit of resistance to take the edge off the resonance, maybe 5-10k. That should give it some midrange focus. Then a larger cap(Fender bass tone control) in the signal path with a pot around it. That should thin the sound nicely. You'll have to sweep the pot around to find the right amount of bass, then take it out of the circuit and measure it so you know what resistor to drop in.

[SlowGroove]

Thanks to all for helping out thus far !



James