Story of my tone.

[ELS]

At first I had a crappy 09' Epi Studio, with Ceramic Plus pickups.
The guitar was overpriced, but the alternative was a new epi with only 2 knobs, and it just looked wrong...
Later I found out that the one I bought (with the 4 knobs) had a totally seized truss rod, it still does
But the tone also was pretty boring, at first I switched the magnets from the bridge to the neck, and vice versa. Didn't change the tone (because they're the same )
Then I added another wire for coil splitting, which I didn't like the sound of.
Then I swapped one of the coils from the bridge to the neck pickup, and vice versa. creating a very big imbalance. I also changed the wires to 4 conductor ones... RJ45 cable
That sounded a bit better, nothing special.
Then I spent a few days trying to engineer a circuit that gave me every combination (almost) possible with as few switches as possible. And I did (see later schematic for the circuit).

At first I had a blend knob instead of a pickup selector, but it didn't work so well.
Is was also a push pull pot, it did the same thing as the "neck parallel/series with bridge" switch, and the switch that became that switch in the end, at first it switched a couple diodes on the output as a passive clipping circuit, which didn't work at all.

Then I wanted to rewind one of the stock pickups, I took the bridge slug bobbin and the neck screw bobbin, heated it up in an oven over a can to melt the wax and allow me to get the magnet wire off.
Which also melted the bobbin
Afterwards I took the Ceramic-8 magnet, glued a paper coil former around the magnet, and wound the wire I had salvaged from the stock pickup.
I attached the coil to the flywheel of a tape player to wind it. I couldn't, and still can't tension the wire enough without it breaking all the time, I must've had like 8 breaks in the coil, I soldered them together and kept winding. some parts of the coil were open so I bypassed them, the final coil read 6k instead of the 11k expected... The magnet was oriented North towards the strings.
Afterwards I put the coil in some molten paraffin. pure paraffin sucks for potting anything.

I put the coil in the neck position, it didn't sound good, was also weak.
The neck pickup I put in the bridge position.

Later I got a plastic case EMG HZ-H2A. So I put the neck pickup back in the neck position, and put the EMG in the bridge.
And now it sounded very good. But I still wasn't pleased.

So later I took the EMG pickup apart, accidentally breaking one of the coil start wires, I didn't want to go trough the pain of rewinding the coil again so instead I put the other good coil on the stock pickup baseplate, put the EMG baseplate with the connections below it, and used my garbage 6k pickup for the other coil.

It sounded very nasally, out-of phase sound for any switch combination for the bridge pickup, but putting the pickups in series with each other gave a pretty alright clean tone.

Later I was looking trough the garbage, trying to find another coil to molest, And I found an old AC fan, it was a shaded pole motor with 2 windings on it that looked like they could work for a pickup.
I got the coil out of the core, Then found that one ceramic speaker magnet would fit perfectly inside the coil, and I had another smaller neodymium speaker magnet that fit inside the ceramic magnet, so I put that one inside the ceramic magnet, and the ceramic magnet inside the coil (south towards the strings), then for mounting I found a mounting baseplate for an old relay which was 1mm steel. I used that to mount the pickup right in the middle between the other pickups.
I rarely used the tone control so I removed that and used it for the middle pickup volume instead... the pot needed to be log scale instead, and it was basically an on-off switch since it was linear scale instead.

And together with all this, in a certain combination the tone was such that my high gain tube amp would just get it's overdrive turned off as soon as I put the middle pickup into circuit, and switched the neck pickup to be in series with the bridge.
The most clean tone ever, one that didn't need a flanger to play clean rock tones.

I played with this for a while, until I figured, it wasn't good enough, and I not wanted a classic 59' punchy tone, So I removed the middle pickup, put back the tone control tuned the capacitor values for the best tone to me.

That sounded pretty alright, not perfect.
The night before I had a gig I thought to rewind the other, broken EMG bobbin I had, after I successfully rewound it, I changed my wacky bar coil with the repaired EMG slug bobbin, and damn it sounded great. Such creamy overdrive. And then at the gig it sounded like the best tone ever, too bad the sound engineer couldn't at least try to move the sliders a bit so someone could perhaps hear my solo

Then I thought, well I pretty much found my tone here, but I'm not using all these 10 switches and 3 football fields of cable so I might as well simplify it all. So I did, but it wasn't enough.
I wanted to also change the 4 conductor cables to a 1 conductor shielded cable, But while I was doing that, I broke the start wire from the other EMG bobbin...
I had found some 38AWG vintage PE wire so I thought maybe the mojo was in that... spoiler alert: it wasn't. it sounded like crap after rewinding with 38AWG.

And after that I found some EMG non-retail pickups, the ones that come in some stock guitars. They're passives with a chrome "EMG-HZ" written on the bobbins.
I read that they sound awesome, but they don't, they sound good but they are too plain sounding compared to the H2A with the repaired coil, that one sounded very creamy.
But I don't want to mess with it anymore for now.

I tried my best to reverse engineer what the circuit was when I got the crazy clean tone, this is about what it was:

The wacky pickup, the bar coil was held in mostly by the pickup ring, I tried gluing it with some epoxy but it wouldn't stick to the wax of course.




You can see my switch circuitry that I came up with, and then the middle pickup which was clearly an after-thought as you can see.
Later I figured out that it's not really every possible combination, but I did figure out a sort-of switch matrix that could be extended for however many pickups you want, and to the best of my knowledge actually does get every possible config.

The circuit is designed like this:
The first switch is a simple phase switcher, for each coil. Then the negative and positive "rails" for each pickup extend towards the right.
Then you take a connection from the negative rail from one coil, put a switch to the next coil, and repeat for every coil.
Then you take a connection from the negative rail from the same coil, put a switch to the 2nd next coil, repeat for every coil until there is no '2nd next' coil to connect to.
Then you begin from the 2nd coil and repeat the last step.
Then you take a connection from the negative rail from the same coil, put a switch to the 3rd next coil, repeat until there's no "3rd" coil to connect to.
Then you begin from the 2nd coil, repeat last step.
Then you begin from the 3rd coil, repeat last-last step. (not applicable in the shown circuit, it would be for 6 coils)
See the pattern? you can extend this infinitely.
Then after you're done with the negative rail, repeat the same for the positive rail of each coil.
After that, connect a switch from each negative rail of all coils, connect them to a common output connection (i. e ground)
After that, do the same for the positive rail of each coil, but instead connect it to the other common output connection (i.e the output jack)
I did make a circuit that used electronic switches and a microcontroller to do the switching, you could program it so it would not show useless combinations (like when you have 0 output switches connected for example)


Here's a video of the gig I played with the repaired H2A pickup:


Another solo bit at 3:18


So the takeaway?
I guess... know what you want first, before you keep changing it.
Although I go by more of a "if you think it's fine, change it" way of living. So that's a bit hypocritical.

 

[ELS]

Ok so I tested to see if shorting one coil of the pickup changed the sound much, and I didn't hear any noticeable different, then I checked if putting them in series did, and yes it did a lot.
However, I slapped the middle pickup back on just to see if maybe it does something cool, and it did.
In the end what I learned is that:
1. using my current pickups, putting them in series only ruins the tone, no bass, a bit weird sounding.
2. putting just the neck pickup in parallel with the middle pickup still did give me a very clear sound, but there's a sharp treble peak that's very high, and that little thing allows the amp to go into overdrive. It doesn't really help much rolling the tone down either.
Oh and I forgot to mention, for some reason, it's the most microphonic pickup ever made. Shits' so microphonic, your eardrums will burst if you switch the pickup selector.
It made me learn to pick without hitting the pickup REAL fast
But it sure isn't the same as before, before I would use either the bridge or the neck pickup with great tone, now it only works with the neck pickup, the bridge has a weird out-of-phase sound.
Adding the pickup reduced the attack slightly, probably since it's such an overpowered magnet and it can't be adjusted to not be so close to the strings.

 

[ELS]

I suspect perhaps the bridge pickup is the outlier here, maybe getting another H2A is a good idea
How many shitty pickups do I buy to satisfy my desire

 

[paul-e-mann]

I suspect perhaps the bridge pickup is the outlier here, maybe getting another H2A is a good idea
How many shitty pickups do I buy to satisfy my desire

If you had tried an A2 or A5 magnet in your original pickups you could have saved yourself alot of time, but then you would have missed out on that long strange trip you went down.

 

[ELS]

If you had tried an A2 or A5 magnet in your original pickups you could have saved yourself alot of time, but then you would have missed out on that long strange trip you went down.

Yeah but I was kinda just after something special.
I chose to buy an LP not because I liked Angus Young or... *insert LP player here*, but because it was the less-popular choice.
Everybody plays a strat, I don't just want to be anybody.
But I wanted the strat sound so that's why at first I just couldn't get satisfied with the tone no matter what, and when I got what I wanted, then I wanted a normal LP tone... yeah
But I'll probably add the middle pickup back on, it still gave me THAT tone that I want. I'll pot it in some wax because the microphonics are so intense, if I put a boost pedal in front of my amp, most of what you hear, especially on the bridge pickup is the microphonics.
I hope that isn't the mojo in that pickup, I don't think it is but who knows.

It has that low gain cream to it, but the magic thing is that it just wont push the amp into overdrive, I used this pickup with that "Madman amp" schematic I posted here, and with all that gain, it could still give a very clean tone with max gain. Yet it always has a low gain creamyness, hard to describe, I'll have to finish my mic preamp and record some audio.
That "Mary had a little lamb" cover I posted was recorded with that pickup config I had btw.

 

[ELS]

So potting that pickup worked ofc, and it didnt ruin the tone.
I'm actually now thinking, perhaps that pickup was wired out of phase... I have no idea since the direction of the coil could be flipped easily and without any signs of it being flipped.
I had to flip it after I messed it up after potting in wax, it didn't sound clean, it kinda just sounded like a worse neck pickup, after flipping it back, it sounded very clean as described