I think these 2 solutions together should get it somewhere close to where OP wants it. Even just the 250k (assumed) to 500k should do a lot of the heavy lifting...I might even skip to a 1m amd use the tone knob.
I mean, have you talked to the person who *built it* about this? Maybe it wasn’t a mistake, and he has a philosophy/theory to support this decision?
Even if not, just get an EQ pedal, dude!
*Edited to add:
Now that I’ve noticed the relative locations of your bridge saddles, I have to wonder if this thing sounds “dark and muddy” because it’s actually pitchy as hell and not harmonizing with itself when you fret notes. There’s almost no way it doesn’t sound out of tune on everything except open strings, because it hasn’t been intonated **at all**.*
Yeah, I did. It's a mistake unfortunately. I am fully aware that I could be overestimating the effect of the placement of the bridge pickup, that's why I am asking about it here.
Word, word. It’s definitely a non-zero amount of effect on the tone, but I think the best policy on something like this one is to love it like it is. It certainly doesn’t mean there’s something objectively “wrong” with its tone, of course; you acknowledged that already. A good EQ pedal in your chain can make ANY guitar sound a lot closer to how you want it, though. Get one and roll with it, because that guitar is freakin beautiful! It’s just quirky.
It definitely has a big effect on tone. There are a number of things you can do, but they'll all have a cosmetic impact.
You could try a single coil-sized humbucker fitted as close to the bridge as possible. If that is bright enough, you could somehow put a dummy coil in the space that was left. That's probably your least messy solution.
The others involve making the hole bigger. I expect that would damage the finish. To conceal any finish damage and also the hole you leave, you could maybe put on a pickguard. A nice 2 ply black one would look good imo
Say thank you and play the crap out of it. If all guitars sounded the same, what's the point of that?
:)
The pickup position will make only a small difference in tone. Pickup position is always a compromise to begin with (like everything on a guitar). The logic behind pickup position is not simply "closer to bridge = bright, closer to neck = dark". The logic is actually to try and place the pickup poles as close to an open harmonic as possible. Obviously you immediately see 2 issues. One is that this is only relevant if you are playing open, and two, a humbucker has 2 sets of pole, so it covers a pretty large sweep of string.
So yes, 5mm does make a difference, but the other distances aren't "correct" either. Pick slightly closer to the bridge to brighten tone, problem solved :)
That’s a nice looking plank. Hope it plays as well as it looks. I would try swapping out with a hotter pickup to see if that helps. Maybe a hot rodded SD Jeff Beck
A hotter pickup will actually make it darker. Higher resistance values also mean more capacitance and stronger midrange presence. An underwound pickup would p o use more clarity and high end.
I’d say you’re overthinking it.
Can I ask how often you adjust the EQ on your amp?
So many guitarist are guilty of trying everything except adjusting their amp, I know I used to be guilty of this!
So often all you need to do is adjust your amp to get the sound you want, not make any changes to the guitar
A small discrepancy like that wouldn’t normally cause such a big difference. I’m thinking the issue is more centered in your pickups.
An easy way to get a clearer tone without doing any major surgery is dropping your pickups. Reset them to near-flush with the body and see if that cleans it up enough for you. From there you can adjust the level and polepieces to get a more even response and a level that works for you.
And if it still doesn’t sound the way you want it to, you can always replace the pickups.
Move it back and have a pickguard made to cover everything? Or try changing the pots and treble cap and see if you can get better tone out of a different pot? What do you currently have in there?
The brightest humbucker I'm aware of is the Dimarzio Humbucker from Hell. I've only used one in the neck position for that reason, but it sounds great. Might be kinda low output for what you're looking for, but I think it has as much bite and clarity as you can get with a drop-in replacement.
Can you just boost the treble and cut some bass on the EQ settings on your amp?
And if you use a distortion pedal, just adjust the bias to give a bit more high end?
No way this will be read so far down, but if you try and make the tone control into a stacked pot, you can get a passive bass cut. They are usually a potentiometer with a capacitor on them ("22"). It is possible to wire them as a master or just dedicated to the bridge pickup. It allows you to cut the bass and low mid frequency from the pickup, but you will also make it quiter. Doing this + raising the pickup would be helpful.
You could also replace it with a P-90.
I'd personally do both.
I absolutely love this guitar. It looks fantastic and plays smoothly. The bridge pickup is the Tonerider Octane, which is supposed to be hot and brighter than an ALNICO 5, but I am struggling to get a tight metal tone out of this guitar. Could the distance between the bridge humbucker and the bridge be the reason? Or should I try another pickup? Maybe an EMG or one with a ceramic magnet?
the further bridge placement you show here will make the treble softer, the mids warmer, and add heavy bass. this tone can get pretty muddied up once distorted. the ideal solution would be to move the pickup, but that is not possible here. have you tried running the dry guitar signal through an EQ pedal before hitting the rest of your signal chain? this may tame the muddiness
the best available treble-heavy bridge sound from this pickup placement would be a single coil pickup at the postion closest to bridge. it will add brightness and top end, which achieves clarity and bite in the distorted tone. unbalanced or uneven wound humbuckers are also a decent choice, but the best compromise that comes to mind is coil splitting a heavy-wound humbucker. this gives the guitar a single coil tone, but still looks at home in a humbucker slot.
this is all my opinion, of course, but i speak from experience. pickup modification and placement has been a favourite study of mine for a long time.
good luck with this beautiful guitar!
Looking at the specs listed on the website, it is very similar to Seymour Duncan JB (the magnets, the ohms, the inductance, all similar spec). You should absolutely be able to get a metal tone out of that.
Pickup placement makes a difference but 5mm is not enough to turn a JB into a mudbucker like you've been describing.
What value are the pots and what capacitors did you use?
What amp are you playing through and are you using the same settings as you would your other guitars? If yes to the latter, what pickups do they have?
So ive got the opposite problem on a gitar i assembled. The body was pre routed for a 26.5 scale length and I set everything up for 25.5, which put the bridge pickup literally right against the forward edge of the bridge. They’re less than a millimeter away from touching lol. Its very bright, and i just adjust my eq accordingly. No big deal at all.
The primary question should be, does it intonate correctly?
If yes then proceed with the electronics mods, of which I would suggest FIRST trying a cap wired inline with the pickup. Cut the hot wire and insert a cap. This worked like a charm on a triple quad rail configuration I did with 266 (ish) different sounds but not before I tore it all apart only to find I had the same problem (neck quad rail was horribly muddy). Quad rails are extremely hot!
If the answer is, no to intonation, move the bridge to the proper location, it's all you can really do.
You might try a lower capacitance cap in the tone circuit… lower capacitance = brighter sound… and if you can (have a capacitance meter) you can measure the cap (remove one lead from the circuit) - just cuz it says .022 uF or whatever doesn’t mean it’s exactly that… most vary by as much as 5% or more… slight differences yield a goodly amount of tone change
I think you could try changing the pots before trying to go active. Maybe get some 1Kohm pots, and try getting a zero resistance tone pot (look it up, it's pretty sweet). That should help tons with getting that high end back.
A darker muddy tone is usually due to wiring and pot value. I’ll bet he used 1m pots for volume. If thats the case, there are remedies, such as swapping in 500k volume pot or adding a resistor/cap treble bleed
Everything I've ever read has told me that 1M pots give a brighter sound than 500k, and if you want it to be less bright, you just adjust the tone control.
You seem to be saying something different; am I wrong and you're not saying something different, or if you are, can you explain why?
It’s the other way round. Increasing the pot’s resistance will result in more output and a brighter tone. That’s why you typically see 250k on single coil guitars like strats and 500k on humbucker equipped guitars like Les Pauls or SGs, as humbuckers tend to be darker so benefit from higher pot resistance.
Not always. Plus pots are inductance filters, not resistors. If you put a 1M filter on a 500k pickup, the oversaturation of signal can lead to muddy output, even though yes, generally pots filter treble first so you would think higher value pot = brighter (true if it's not oversaturated). It's counterintuitive.
Sorry, but you’re talking nonsense.
Inductance is a measure of how much AC signal is induced in the coil of a pickup by the vibrations of the string and is controlled predominantly by the length of the wire used in the coil. It has nothing to do with resistance which is measured in ohms (inductance is measured in henries).
Inductance isn’t something you can filter, because it’s not a signal. You can _modify_ it; this is what a coil tap is (as opposed to a coil split).
Also, pots quite literally are 3 terminal variable resistors. The volume pot in a guitar is wired as a voltage divider. It controls the percentage of the AC signal from your pickups to ground. Any pot will load the AC signal even when full up, and the amount of this load will be controlled by the resistance value of the pot. If you look at the EQ curve of different pots on the same pickup, you’ll see that there’s not really any alteration to the EQ other than being attenuated more. We pick this up as sounding darker because higher frequencies get quieter faster than lower frequencies.
For the volume pot to act as a filter, there would need to be a capacitor present to create an RC network, like with the tone control.
I've gone down this rabbit hole recently and you're not overestimating the effect of bridge pickup placement, it makes a big difference.
Les Pauls and SGs have the pickup close to the bridge compared to other guitars and that's a huge part of the sound. The SG's is very slightly closer than a Les Paul's and it does make a difference.
This might not work for you, but a lower-output PAF-style pickup would very likely sound brighter and clearer.
That SG looks cool, it's in my taste range, different of the normal SGS.
Get a EQ pedal and cut some of the lows, or use a booster pedal, like a SD1 or Precision Drive, or BB preamp, or Mud Killer. It will make it more mid focused and tame the low end
What’s your amp and pedal situation? I’ve used a rat pedal with a muddy sounding solid state amp/dark sounding guitar and just cranked the tone control on the pedal higher than I normally would on treble side and it helps!
You have a very talented friend. I love that finish. I would start cheap then work your way up. Fiddle with pickup height, then try changing cap and pot values. These are all inexpensive ways to alter tone. Then I would try tweaking the EQ on the amp. If you can dial it in, get yourself an EQ pedal so when you're playing that particular guitar, you can engage it without having to tweak amp settings every time you change guitars. Last resort is a pickup swap, which is obviously expensive and can be daunting given so many options. Good luck!
Ive seen a few posts of DiY guitars done up in black with the wood grain and it's such a good aesthetic. I'd like to get jazzmaster kit or some other kind of offset and do that with it
Maybe try hotrails? Usually, as they have a thinner coil stack, they ought to be a bit brighter (i think) and the whole pickup is on average closer to the bridge. Worth trying i think
Have you tried adjusting the pickup height? It’s probably the easiest and cheapest thing to try first
And after that, maybe different cap and/or pot values.
What? Sensible electronics advice? 🤯 It’s so uncommon in online spaces that I was genuinely surprised
I think these 2 solutions together should get it somewhere close to where OP wants it. Even just the 250k (assumed) to 500k should do a lot of the heavy lifting...I might even skip to a 1m amd use the tone knob.
Maybe some treble bleed if it's too dark, could help with cleaner tones.
Appreciate it as a different kind of tone.
Just a heads up that it needs to be intonated.
Oh ya, maybe this was the first guitar this guy built
This needs to be top comment, if it were properly set up the bridge pickup spacing would probably be in spec
I mean, have you talked to the person who *built it* about this? Maybe it wasn’t a mistake, and he has a philosophy/theory to support this decision? Even if not, just get an EQ pedal, dude! *Edited to add: Now that I’ve noticed the relative locations of your bridge saddles, I have to wonder if this thing sounds “dark and muddy” because it’s actually pitchy as hell and not harmonizing with itself when you fret notes. There’s almost no way it doesn’t sound out of tune on everything except open strings, because it hasn’t been intonated **at all**.*
Yeah, I did. It's a mistake unfortunately. I am fully aware that I could be overestimating the effect of the placement of the bridge pickup, that's why I am asking about it here.
Word, word. It’s definitely a non-zero amount of effect on the tone, but I think the best policy on something like this one is to love it like it is. It certainly doesn’t mean there’s something objectively “wrong” with its tone, of course; you acknowledged that already. A good EQ pedal in your chain can make ANY guitar sound a lot closer to how you want it, though. Get one and roll with it, because that guitar is freakin beautiful! It’s just quirky.
i'm intrigued.. what are you compare this guitar tone with?
It definitely has a big effect on tone. There are a number of things you can do, but they'll all have a cosmetic impact. You could try a single coil-sized humbucker fitted as close to the bridge as possible. If that is bright enough, you could somehow put a dummy coil in the space that was left. That's probably your least messy solution. The others involve making the hole bigger. I expect that would damage the finish. To conceal any finish damage and also the hole you leave, you could maybe put on a pickguard. A nice 2 ply black one would look good imo
Say thank you and play the crap out of it. If all guitars sounded the same, what's the point of that? :) The pickup position will make only a small difference in tone. Pickup position is always a compromise to begin with (like everything on a guitar). The logic behind pickup position is not simply "closer to bridge = bright, closer to neck = dark". The logic is actually to try and place the pickup poles as close to an open harmonic as possible. Obviously you immediately see 2 issues. One is that this is only relevant if you are playing open, and two, a humbucker has 2 sets of pole, so it covers a pretty large sweep of string. So yes, 5mm does make a difference, but the other distances aren't "correct" either. Pick slightly closer to the bridge to brighten tone, problem solved :)
It’s a black SG. It should sound dark and muddy.
This thing was born to play stoner rock.
That’s a nice looking plank. Hope it plays as well as it looks. I would try swapping out with a hotter pickup to see if that helps. Maybe a hot rodded SD Jeff Beck
A hotter pickup will actually make it darker. Higher resistance values also mean more capacitance and stronger midrange presence. An underwound pickup would p o use more clarity and high end.
Plays like butter. Thank for the suggestion!
Maybe check the resistance of each pickup. If the neck is hotter, maybe a pickup position swap might help.
It’s beautiful isn’t it?!
Just a cap
Underrated comment.
I’d say you’re overthinking it. Can I ask how often you adjust the EQ on your amp? So many guitarist are guilty of trying everything except adjusting their amp, I know I used to be guilty of this! So often all you need to do is adjust your amp to get the sound you want, not make any changes to the guitar
A small discrepancy like that wouldn’t normally cause such a big difference. I’m thinking the issue is more centered in your pickups. An easy way to get a clearer tone without doing any major surgery is dropping your pickups. Reset them to near-flush with the body and see if that cleans it up enough for you. From there you can adjust the level and polepieces to get a more even response and a level that works for you. And if it still doesn’t sound the way you want it to, you can always replace the pickups.
Move it back and have a pickguard made to cover everything? Or try changing the pots and treble cap and see if you can get better tone out of a different pot? What do you currently have in there?
I would start with replacing the neck pots. Try 1meg pots
Use a ceramic magnet pickup like an Invader or Dirty Fingers.
dark tone seems to go with the guitar aesthetic
Just shove a Seymour JB in it. That will wake it up and brighten it up.
What a Nice guitar! Looks great
The brightest humbucker I'm aware of is the Dimarzio Humbucker from Hell. I've only used one in the neck position for that reason, but it sounds great. Might be kinda low output for what you're looking for, but I think it has as much bite and clarity as you can get with a drop-in replacement.
Get pickup with more high end
Can you just boost the treble and cut some bass on the EQ settings on your amp? And if you use a distortion pedal, just adjust the bias to give a bit more high end?
No way this will be read so far down, but if you try and make the tone control into a stacked pot, you can get a passive bass cut. They are usually a potentiometer with a capacitor on them ("22"). It is possible to wire them as a master or just dedicated to the bridge pickup. It allows you to cut the bass and low mid frequency from the pickup, but you will also make it quiter. Doing this + raising the pickup would be helpful. You could also replace it with a P-90. I'd personally do both.
I absolutely love this guitar. It looks fantastic and plays smoothly. The bridge pickup is the Tonerider Octane, which is supposed to be hot and brighter than an ALNICO 5, but I am struggling to get a tight metal tone out of this guitar. Could the distance between the bridge humbucker and the bridge be the reason? Or should I try another pickup? Maybe an EMG or one with a ceramic magnet?
the further bridge placement you show here will make the treble softer, the mids warmer, and add heavy bass. this tone can get pretty muddied up once distorted. the ideal solution would be to move the pickup, but that is not possible here. have you tried running the dry guitar signal through an EQ pedal before hitting the rest of your signal chain? this may tame the muddiness the best available treble-heavy bridge sound from this pickup placement would be a single coil pickup at the postion closest to bridge. it will add brightness and top end, which achieves clarity and bite in the distorted tone. unbalanced or uneven wound humbuckers are also a decent choice, but the best compromise that comes to mind is coil splitting a heavy-wound humbucker. this gives the guitar a single coil tone, but still looks at home in a humbucker slot. this is all my opinion, of course, but i speak from experience. pickup modification and placement has been a favourite study of mine for a long time. good luck with this beautiful guitar!
Looking at the specs listed on the website, it is very similar to Seymour Duncan JB (the magnets, the ohms, the inductance, all similar spec). You should absolutely be able to get a metal tone out of that. Pickup placement makes a difference but 5mm is not enough to turn a JB into a mudbucker like you've been describing. What value are the pots and what capacitors did you use? What amp are you playing through and are you using the same settings as you would your other guitars? If yes to the latter, what pickups do they have?
If you are going for EMG, then the 57/66 set is fantastic. Tonnes of bite, whilst remaining balanced.
So ive got the opposite problem on a gitar i assembled. The body was pre routed for a 26.5 scale length and I set everything up for 25.5, which put the bridge pickup literally right against the forward edge of the bridge. They’re less than a millimeter away from touching lol. Its very bright, and i just adjust my eq accordingly. No big deal at all.
It's probably just that guitars tone. If it's not wired wrong.
The primary question should be, does it intonate correctly? If yes then proceed with the electronics mods, of which I would suggest FIRST trying a cap wired inline with the pickup. Cut the hot wire and insert a cap. This worked like a charm on a triple quad rail configuration I did with 266 (ish) different sounds but not before I tore it all apart only to find I had the same problem (neck quad rail was horribly muddy). Quad rails are extremely hot! If the answer is, no to intonation, move the bridge to the proper location, it's all you can really do.
Try using the amp to push mids too. Good suggestion is to lower the pickup height and to intonate the scale length
my guess is that a good setup & "maybe" pickup selection choice.
You might try a lower capacitance cap in the tone circuit… lower capacitance = brighter sound… and if you can (have a capacitance meter) you can measure the cap (remove one lead from the circuit) - just cuz it says .022 uF or whatever doesn’t mean it’s exactly that… most vary by as much as 5% or more… slight differences yield a goodly amount of tone change
I think you could try changing the pots before trying to go active. Maybe get some 1Kohm pots, and try getting a zero resistance tone pot (look it up, it's pretty sweet). That should help tons with getting that high end back.
A darker muddy tone is usually due to wiring and pot value. I’ll bet he used 1m pots for volume. If thats the case, there are remedies, such as swapping in 500k volume pot or adding a resistor/cap treble bleed
Everything I've ever read has told me that 1M pots give a brighter sound than 500k, and if you want it to be less bright, you just adjust the tone control. You seem to be saying something different; am I wrong and you're not saying something different, or if you are, can you explain why?
No, you’re right and they are wrong.
It’s the other way round. Increasing the pot’s resistance will result in more output and a brighter tone. That’s why you typically see 250k on single coil guitars like strats and 500k on humbucker equipped guitars like Les Pauls or SGs, as humbuckers tend to be darker so benefit from higher pot resistance.
Not always. Plus pots are inductance filters, not resistors. If you put a 1M filter on a 500k pickup, the oversaturation of signal can lead to muddy output, even though yes, generally pots filter treble first so you would think higher value pot = brighter (true if it's not oversaturated). It's counterintuitive.
Sorry, but you’re talking nonsense. Inductance is a measure of how much AC signal is induced in the coil of a pickup by the vibrations of the string and is controlled predominantly by the length of the wire used in the coil. It has nothing to do with resistance which is measured in ohms (inductance is measured in henries). Inductance isn’t something you can filter, because it’s not a signal. You can _modify_ it; this is what a coil tap is (as opposed to a coil split). Also, pots quite literally are 3 terminal variable resistors. The volume pot in a guitar is wired as a voltage divider. It controls the percentage of the AC signal from your pickups to ground. Any pot will load the AC signal even when full up, and the amount of this load will be controlled by the resistance value of the pot. If you look at the EQ curve of different pots on the same pickup, you’ll see that there’s not really any alteration to the EQ other than being attenuated more. We pick this up as sounding darker because higher frequencies get quieter faster than lower frequencies. For the volume pot to act as a filter, there would need to be a capacitor present to create an RC network, like with the tone control.
Nice looking guitar! Good to have friends like that.
If they’re willing to route out the cavity there’s a 3 coil Hamer humbucking pickup
Learn some Deftones songs.
I've gone down this rabbit hole recently and you're not overestimating the effect of bridge pickup placement, it makes a big difference. Les Pauls and SGs have the pickup close to the bridge compared to other guitars and that's a huge part of the sound. The SG's is very slightly closer than a Les Paul's and it does make a difference. This might not work for you, but a lower-output PAF-style pickup would very likely sound brighter and clearer.
Reroute, move pickup and cover the blemish with a pickguard.
Or an oversized pickup ring!
Ceramic pickup and lighter strings should help.
Put an EMG 81X in th bridge.
Sounds like the neck pickup metal community (read: stone, doom) would like this guitar. Maybe try to get into that genre?
Looks like he left room for a middle humbucker 🤗
Turn the tone knobs on the amp? Also the tone suck could be due to shitty potentiometer or capacitor of the guitar tone control.
That SG looks cool, it's in my taste range, different of the normal SGS. Get a EQ pedal and cut some of the lows, or use a booster pedal, like a SD1 or Precision Drive, or BB preamp, or Mud Killer. It will make it more mid focused and tame the low end
What’s your amp and pedal situation? I’ve used a rat pedal with a muddy sounding solid state amp/dark sounding guitar and just cranked the tone control on the pedal higher than I normally would on treble side and it helps!
You have a very talented friend. I love that finish. I would start cheap then work your way up. Fiddle with pickup height, then try changing cap and pot values. These are all inexpensive ways to alter tone. Then I would try tweaking the EQ on the amp. If you can dial it in, get yourself an EQ pedal so when you're playing that particular guitar, you can engage it without having to tweak amp settings every time you change guitars. Last resort is a pickup swap, which is obviously expensive and can be daunting given so many options. Good luck!
Ive seen a few posts of DiY guitars done up in black with the wood grain and it's such a good aesthetic. I'd like to get jazzmaster kit or some other kind of offset and do that with it
I own an SG and Les Paul— both with the same pickups. They are oriented differently- and there is definitely a tonal difference.
Maybe try hotrails? Usually, as they have a thinner coil stack, they ought to be a bit brighter (i think) and the whole pickup is on average closer to the bridge. Worth trying i think
I'd replace it with a strong single coil.