No Loads, not here!
This beautiful Gretsch didn’t know what was coming. When we first met, her dad was saying that she sounded a little darker than he would have liked, like a blanket was thrown over the tone or something. I agreed, knowing that humbuckers sometimes have that quality to them. Fortunately I know a handful of ways to squeeze a little brightness out of dark pickups. But first, I had to take a look at what I was working with!
Oh my! Ok, so I pulled everything out because I wanted to check two things: one, is there a treble bleed capacitor on the master volume? and two, is the tone pot wired the modern way or the way Gibson did it in the 50s? Defeated, I got my answer. This thing was already wired with a treble bleed and 50s wiring! Which meant that aside from just getting those pickups closer to the strings, there wasn’t a whole lot more that I could do to preserve the highs. Even the pots were all 500k. Someone at the factory knew what they were doing! 1Meg pots might make a small difference, but the change to the sweep of the pots isn’t worth it in my opinion. This dad actually uses these knobs and was pretty comfortable dialing them in a certain way.
Here’s the treble bleed cap, and while 6800 picofarads isn’t exactly huge, I figured the guys at the Gretch factory were pretty confident that this value works well for the setup. I certainly don’t hate it. Plus, putting a bigger cap here wouldn’t give me any additional highs, it would only let more of the current high frequencies pass through as the volume gets rolled down. meh.
Also, you can see here that lugs one and two each only have one wire coming out, which means that the tone pot pokes in somewhere after this whole mess. This guitar does not have modern tone wiring that pokes in at lug one, the input (aka coil loading). Following it down, I discovered that the grey wire leads to the tone pot, and then the output jack, which means that this is 50s wiring (aka output loading), which preserves even more high frequency as the volume gets rolled down!
While these mods are great, and definitely make this guitar brighter than it would be without them, none of them actually make the guitar brighter when the volume is at 10! So I got a little creative.
I got a new 500k pot and lifted up the enclosure tabs,
took the whole thing apart,
and scratched part of the resistive track off, effectively making this a “no-load” tone pot, which means that when it’s all the way at 10, it physically removes itself from the circuit. This is cool because any load, whether it’s on the coil or the output, will attenuate high frequencies just a little bit–BTW attenuate means ‘to lessen,’ but it feels fancier to say attenuate, so I do. Attenuate… Attenuate, oh yeah.
Anyway, once I had this bad boy all put back together, it was just a simple matter of replacing the old tone pot, leaving all the wiring exactly the same.
The result was just as I expected! More highs with all function preserved. What a simple improvement! I think I’ll make all my tone pots “no-load” from here on out. Well… ok maybe not all of them, but more for sure!
And that’s it for this week! Thanks again for reading, and I’ll see you again next time!
