Tone wizard doesn't quite do it.....

[kgarvey@hotmail]

The tone wizard recommends a 59 humbucker for my fender alder body, maple/rosewood hss strat but doesn't talk about the pots to get the best results.

Equally it suggests a pearly gates for my fender hss alder body, maple/maple.

If I'm concentrating on the bridge humbucker for both of these guitars (I'll come back to the singles later....I know people will say 250k for the benefit of the singles but just concentrate on the best best results for the bridge at the moment please), what pots should I use with these two guitars?

Talk volume pot, tone pot/no tone to the bridge, tone cap.....

Thanks!!!

[Jessie Sammler]

Hmm. My MIA Strat is alder, maple/maple, has a PG Plus in the bridge, and sounds great to me. I don't know pot values, though. There is a tone pot connected.

[Dave Z]

Tone wiz plays it safe. THinking is that 59 has more glass than a Pearly which is middier (the A2 magnet makes for a mellow sound) but in my experience the 59 has a muddy tone and benefits from a 500K mag. I found the 59s warm - nicely so. So, YMMV. Best thing to do: listen to the pickup recordings on the site or order the CDROM. The clean tones are quite telling. Tone wiz NEVER tells you to use anything interesting like a CC or C5! Lots of great pups to choose from.

With a bright maple board 250s will tone down the treble a bit. You can probably run 500K pots with a warmer guitar - like a rosewood fboard. You may not know which to use until you try, as the individual body wood has a big effect. For instance, I have a old EPi SG clone that has HUGE bass, the thing just resonates low end, and pickups that sound good on that are shrill as heck on an all-mahogany (even neck!) strat I built. Go figure.

With a rosewood neck I'd go with 500K and use the tone control to roll off highs if the singles are too bright. Or choose Alnico2 pro for the singles - great tone, not too much glass, they could probly live with a 500K pot no problem.

Note with either tone or vol ctrl the 250s will 'roll off' a bit of treble compared to a 500. Unless you get a Deltatone pot (infinite resistance at 0).

[jake_xms3_punk]

i got a dd and 2 alnico 2 pros on my alder strat, maple neck with 500k pots, sounds good

[dr. ad]

JBs and other brighter HBs are regularly used with 250K pots anyway
so are you definitely using 2 fender singles in each guitar? remember that in strats there's more than 1 way to configure which p/ups go onto which pots; if i had a dark bucker and didn't want to put it through the pots, i'd just send it straight to the output jack from the selector

i'd consider a JB or a DD (300K pot?) in the one with the maple board

[Lewguitar]

This is the reason I don't care for swiss army knife HB/S/S guitars and never have. They're such a compromise. The HB is always to loud and the singles to bright and you can't use one volume pot that sounds good with both pickups - and there no room to pick with the HB and middle single coil crowding my favorite place to pick!

OK - the only HB pickup I like with 250K pots is the JB. So I'd use that and go with 250K pots through out.

The Pearly Gates Plus is wound with extra turns of wire to be hotter than a PGb, uses an alnico 5 magnet to be birighter than a PGb and is designed to sound good with single coils in a HB/S/S guitar - it's worth considering too.

Lew

[ganzosrevenge]

This is the reason I don't care for swiss army knife HB/S/S guitars and never have. They're such a compromise. The HB is always to loud and the singles to bright and you can't use one volume pot that sounds good with both pickups - and there no room to pick with the HB and middle single coil crowding my favorite place to pick!

OK - the only HB pickup I like with 250K pots is the JB. So I'd use that (or a Pearly Gates Plus - also a hotter than vintage alnico 5 pickup) and go with 250K pots through out.

Lew

Lew,

H/S/S guitars are a sort of compromise, however I think the amount of compromise can be mitigated to a good extent with good pots and a 5-way super switch. If you can put the 2nd tone to bridge alone, autosplit position 2 so that both tones work (tone 1 to the middle SC, tone 2 to the inside coil of the HB) and put that in parallel, you can still get a good bit of strattiness while knowing you have the HB at bay. Another thing I did was give the HB its own 500k pot that no other pup shares, this way the single coils can keep their chimeyness, and the HB can be used as a sort of natural onboard boost / dump-switch. (Dump-switch in the sense that the extra output lets me push the amp harder and better project.) I know super-switches can be a royal pain to solder up, because of how many terminals they have and the possible combinations that can ensue, but it's really a good way to minimize the loss of "strat" you get.
*End of Lew's Quote Response*

As for the tone wizard, tone wizard tends to play it safe using a generalization of what works for various guitars. Obviously, some guitars because of their wood properties may fall outside of what "tone wizard" recommends, or the idea of how to get that sound may be different than what TW recommends. The fact is is that Tone Wizard has to cater to a mass that ranges from "Joe 'I-wanna-change-my-pups-cuz-its-cool" to someone like zhangliqun (sorry, I just needed an "opposite extreme" reference). I don't consider it an end-all so much as a good basic starting point to get an idea where I should be going pup-wise. It's a tool, like a calculator on a math test, and it's only as good (or bad) as the person who's inputting into it.

Jason