What to do with my studio?

[Slash19]

So I have a schecter omen 6 with an alnico 2 pro in the bridge and I absolutely love the tone of this guitar. I find myself playing it just as much as my LP Studio even though I love the feel of my studio just its too dark sounding. Would taking the covers off my pickups in the studio brighten them up and make them hotter or is that just myth? Or should I just swap them out with something else? Any opinions are welcomed and appreciated.

 

[SKATTERBRANE]

Try 500K tone pots.

 

[Hector Arcadius]

What pickups and electronics (pots, caps) are in the Studio right now?

 

[Slash19]

Pickups:
Neck - 490R
Bridge - 498T
Pots:
Volume - 300k linear
Tone - 500k non linear
As far as the caps go, I'm not sure I don't see any listed on the studio specs on Gibsons website.

 

[So What]

Adjust your pole pieces up. Especially on the treble side. That should brighten it up.

 

[C Squared]

If you want a little brighter first thing I'd suggest is 500k pots and maybe swap caps too (many here like PIO, but orange drops are readily available, inexpensive, and respond a lot better then the tiny ceramics that usually come stock.) If that doesn't do it then a pickup swap

 

[Slash19]

If you want a little brighter first thing I'd suggest is 500k pots and maybe swap caps too (many here like PIO, but orange drops are readily available, inexpensive, and respond a lot better then the tiny ceramics that usually come stock.) If that doesn't do it then a pickup swap

I'm not a big electronics guy. So I guess I'm not quite understanding, the Gibson specs say the tone pots are non linear 500k. Are there different 500k pots other than these or are you guys talking about the volume pots?

 

[SKATTERBRANE]

A different pot that is 500K, no matter what the quality, will not make your tone brighter, since you already have 500K pots.

 

[C Squared]

I'm not a big electronics guy. So I guess I'm not quite understanding, the Gibson specs say the tone pots are non linear 500k. Are there different 500k pots other than these or are you guys talking about the volume pots?

Swapping the volume pots to 500k would allow a little more of the highs to come through. The lower the value the more treble bleeds off. If you need just a little more treble, this is usually a great fix. Vice-versa if something was too bright you could try swapping from a 500k volume to a 250k or 300k pot.

 

[Slash19]

A different pot that is 500K, no matter what the quality, will not make your tone brighter, since you already have 500K pots.

Ok, this is what I was thinking.

So I guess I'll try and upgrade the caps and see what happens to the tone after that. I might even do the volume pots while I'm at it. Thanks for all the help and suggestions, it's really appreciated.

 

[Wraptail]

Do the volume pots. It can make quite a bit of difference.

 

[thexmadxtopxhatter]

Your caps are most likely the stock gibson ceramic capacitors. Throwing in some PIO's should help you get a brighter tone. For pots i'd suggest some CTS's. Throw up some pics too so we can see what you got.

 

[Mr_Wormwood]

In addition to the 500k pots, I would suggest some of the Russian POI caps that are often sold in the member classifieds here. They tend to brighten up LP studios quite well with the 500k pots...taking the covers off does help some as well, but I would start with the cap and pots upgrade.
Good luck

 

[Wraptail]

From reading on the internet, most people refer to the ceramic caps as "edgy sounding" and the PIO caps as "woody sounding." I would not put PIOs in, at least not until those vol pots were replaced... and I'm generally a vintage PIO kinda guy.

If you're going to put PIO caps in there I'd get one's with smaller values than the ceramics, otherwise you could be making things darker than they already are. So if you have .022 caps I'd get .015s.

 

[Orourke]

500k audio taper pots would brighten it up, I like the Bourns regular style from AES. Really nice taper on those.

 

[woolenmammoth]

Your caps are most likely the stock gibson ceramic capacitors. Throwing in some PIO's should help you get a brighter tone.

nothing personal, but there is so much horrid information in this thread starting with the above.

If you were designing a circuit, there is no construction of capacitor that will get you "bright" faster than a ceramic. This is the lesson you learn in the first ten seconds of the first day of the tuning an AC circuit 101. Ceramic caps are bright, they are bright at high impedance nodes, low impedance nodes, bright all the time.

Conversely, making a generalization, the darkest caps you can usually find are paper in oil caps, save for the exceptionally rarer mylar in oil which are the darkest caps I have ever heard personally.

Putting a paper in oil cap to brighten an AC circuit would be akin to putting a ford explorer in the water to go sailing...

Of the dark dark paper in oil caps commonly available today, those sealed metal russian mil caps without the epoxy paint on them are at the top of the list for dark and in general they are lousy choices for guitars as they all need to be formed up with high voltage before they sound anything but dead. They will heal for sure, but if you take them off the shelf and just solder them in you are not hearing that cap conducting the way it should... It can not be stressed enough that these caps need a forming voltage on them first to get the ideal performance out of them, theyve been sitting for eons and the fact that they are sealed doesnt impact this discussion. Since there is no high voltage present in a guitar, they need to be formed and if you dont, they are always gonna sound dead and if you dont think they sound dead and you havent formed them up, you're head will spin around three times if you form them and then listen...

You want a non-sectional polypro cap in there if you are going for bright. you can do that cheap with an orange drop but there are much better choices out there if you open a hifi catalog.

Now all this talk of caps is completely moot if the original poster is playing with his tone on 10, which logic would dictate he is since he's complaining about a guitar not being bright enough... On ten, those caps arent doing much. The whole point of those caps is to build a treble bleeding LC network, they are there to DULL, you've gotta look elsewhere to bright.

Far better places to look are the stop tail material first, bridge and saddles. Then the pickups next, all the 498s Ive ever listened to are very dark sounding pickups.

 

[SKATTERBRANE]

For the price, I use Orange drops quite regularly.