Increasing treble/bite and reducing midrange in humbucker

[John_H]

Good, I'm glad you sorted it out.

[Chuck H]

There are a ton of players out there that wouldn't complain if their guitar was more mid heavy in the lead pickup Use it for what it is and does. Enjoy.

[Guitarist]

A great thread and something I've struggled with too. Now it's all here!

[nosaj]

What about this?
https://ruokangas.com/specifications/valvebucker/
nosaj

[GMC]

Hi Tone meister, i have been tinkering with finding the way to increase clarity and remove muddiness/mid range with humbuckers a lot! it can totally be the guitar’s wood but there are many other considerations, i read you almost completely solved it but i’d like to share some discoveries i have encountered about this problem:

1) in a normal setup a humbucker sees two 500k pots and a load at the output (typically 1meg) that adds up in parallel to an effective resistance of 200k only! (At 10 volume) the way to increment that resistance without using no load pots or changin them to 1meg or higher, is to have your vol pot at 50% (if its log thats around 7-8 vol) that will increase series resistance before the pickup goes thru the parallel network of pots and load, increasing it to about 400k, it made most mid-rangey humbuckers sound very nice, you will loose some high end but that is recovered easily with a treble bleed, you can use a series cap+resistor to controll the amount.

2) the scale of the guitar plays a HUGE role on the strings timbre and harmonic content, naturally that changes the “eq” on the guitar sound.

3) last but not least, something we have been doing at GMC Guitars with great results is to electronically balance the pickups, this is no patented secret but also i dont see many people doing it seriously aside from adjusting by ear to what they like, the balancing basically unscrewing/screwing the polepieces to get the same output level on all strings, you should use a spectrum analyzer because your ears and the acoustic cancellations and resonances of your room will affect enormously on how you percieve sound.

Hope it helps!
Best,

[HaroldBrooks]

Not sure if anyone mentioned this already, but you could just use an EQ post guitar and prior to your rig or amp. The best IMHO would be a 3 or 4 band parametric EQ IMHO, with an adjustable 'Q' setting, allowing you to hone right in on the frequencies you want to enhance, or subtract very precisely. You can use a graphic EQ as well, but I would go with at least 10 bands so you have more flexibility in the midrange and top end.

The Boss PQ-3B is a super quite (low noise) excellent stomp box EQ. The only thing missing from the Boss is the 'Q' adjustment, but I've been able to get many, many different curves out of it when using different guitars and amps, all of them good. You can 'Pinpoint' frequencies with a continuously sweeping pot dedicated to a frequency range.

Remember this, once you mod a guitar, it might sound good with your current rig, but poor if you ever decide to change your amp or cabinet.

A Parametric or a 10 band Stomp box EQ will allow you to fine tune your pickup's frequency response to fit many more circumstances I've found !

https://www.ebay.com/p/Boss-PQ-3B-Ba...Pedal/78709015

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Dunlop-MXR-...pe!11375!US!-1