Using coil splits live/volume drop

thebigcheese

thebigcheese

"Hi, I'm in Delaware."
I finally.put the finishing touches on a custom guitar by adding some custom Antiquities made for me by SD so that I could coil split them. I really like the neck single coil sound for clean stuff, but not so much for heavy drive. The problem is, the single coil is a lot quieter than the humbucker and I would like to bring it up to match the humbucker. Sound familiar?

Here's where it gets tricky, though. Most of the time I use that single coil for my clean sounds, so it would make sense to just make my clean channel louder. But on some songs I have to use a humbucker for the cleans because I have to switch so many other things that it just isn't practical, so then my clean channel would be way louder than the drive channel. For example, in one of our more metal songs, the verse is a chorused clean sound (EQ pedal and chorus pedal on) to the chorus which is chorus off, EQ off, distortion on. On my amp, I actually run my board into the FX return of the amp so that the EQ pedal is my clean channel and the various drive channels of the amp go to a loop on a true bypass looper on the board. So for that song, that involves three buttons to stomp to switch between sections. You can see why I gave up and decided not to also switch pickups... Anyway, I also have a Luke 3, which has a preamp with a makeup gain circuit on it so that all my levels do match, but it is proprietary and they won't send me one. What I would really like is a system like that that works at the guitar level rather than having yet another pedal to stomp, but I haven't been able to find anything. Does anyone have any ideas?
 
Does your EQ pedal have an overall gain or output volume control? Any way you could just turn that down so that when you turn it off things get louder? Does that help at all?
 
The single coil shouldn't be a lot quieter, so maybe it's perception, or maybe not. :confused:
If you can, meter the DC resistance of the single coil as opposed to the full humbucker. It may be, just as SWAG numbers, 6KΩ for the single coil and you'd think 12KΩ for the humbucker. However, if you get 6KΩ and 14KΩ, I'd look at using the other coil on the coil tap switch, if that makes any sense at all.
Or, a weirder idea, and still keep the humbucking benefits, is to switch from series to parallel. However, thinking about it, that may make the parallel mode too quiet. But try it, anyway. That's how you learn.
 
ashcat_lt said:
Does your EQ pedal have an overall gain or output volume control? Any way you could just turn that down so that when you turn it off things get louder? Does that help at all?
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It does, and I guess I could set two presets on it, one for single coils and one for humbuckers, so that I can switch for different songs. I'll just have to be careful about which guitar I bring, since I often bring the Luke, which does balance things. Or I could set it not to... Hm.
 
Yeah my friend's Les Paul does the same thing. Less volume on single coils. I jus turn up the volume on the amp.
 
The HB should be a little less than 6db hotter than the SC. It's like putting two batteries in series. Except that these are AC generators in series. As long as they are oscillating in phase with one another, they will "push together", and add theoretically add to double voltage. Since the coils are so close together, most of the strings' harmonics will be in phase between the two coils. They don't quite get there, though, mostly because of the increase of series resistance. It should also be noticeably darker, with the cutoff coming down about an octave, and the resonant peak coming down a bit.

The parallel configuration will be almost an octave brighter than the SC, which tends to make it "feel" louder, but it's actually pretty close, being sort of the average between the two coils. The average of 1 and 1 is...

I find myself wondering if a reasonable compressor on your clean side might not help. It would require a bunch of messing around, and probably a bit of retraining.

Speaking of which! How bout you don't hit the strings so hard? Want it to come out quiet? Then play quiet! ;)
 
I blend single coil bridge with humbucker position on the neck. Often the bridge is primary (near full up) and the neck is low enough where it's acting like a volume control as well as getting it thicker.
Not really suggesting this as a fix' or anything though, I'm always fiddling and blending a lot (often during a song. More just where I landed.
 
ashcat_lt said:
The HB should be a little less than 6db hotter than the SC. It's like putting two batteries in series. Except that these are AC generators in series. As long as they are oscillating in phase with one another, they will "push together", and add theoretically add to double voltage. Since the coils are so close together, most of the strings' harmonics will be in phase between the two coils. They don't quite get there, though, mostly because of the increase of series resistance. It should also be noticeably darker, with the cutoff coming down about an octave, and the resonant peak coming down a bit.

The parallel configuration will be almost an octave brighter than the SC, which tends to make it "feel" louder, but it's actually pretty close, being sort of the average between the two coils. The average of 1 and 1 is...

I find myself wondering if a reasonable compressor on your clean side might not help. It would require a bunch of messing around, and probably a bit of retraining.

Speaking of which! How bout you don't hit the strings so hard? Want it to come out quiet? Then play quiet! ;)
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I actually don't play very hard, unless the song calls for it (palm muted chugs are pretty heavy for me, and tend to destroy my picks). Or the other guitarist, who does play very hard, is doing his best to overpower me. The thing is, I use one of my amp's channels for a dirty tweed sound, which I really like with the neck single coil, but there isn't quite as much gain as I would like due to the lower output. But I also don't want to have to do a little dance to switch to that channel and also stomp on a boost pedal. I'm trying to limit the number of things I have to switch for changes. I could put an onboard boost (like the EMG ones) that is only active with the single coils, which wouldn't be too hard to wire up...
 
Can you up the channel gain a hair? Singlecoils/tapped humbuckers are less compressed than full humbuckers and a heck of a lot brighter, so I've found sending them into a slightly driven amp tends to even them out a bit, by thickening up the singlecoils while the (darker) humbucker mode isn't as impacted as much by the grit.
 
DrewPeterson7 said:
Can you up the channel gain a hair? Singlecoils/tapped humbuckers are less compressed than full humbuckers and a heck of a lot brighter, so I've found sending them into a slightly driven amp tends to even them out a bit, by thickening up the singlecoils while the (darker) humbucker mode isn't as impacted as much by the grit.
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Firstly, that's a bit of a strange statement. There is no compression inherent in any passive pickup. It is true that a humbucker will usually hit the compression/overdrive "ceiling" of an amplifier sooner or easier than a single coil because it's just plain louder. And yes, if you set the amp so that the SC is already into that region, then it can't get as much louder as it otherwise might. It will tend to "fill out" and get more distorted when you switch to the HB, but it can sort of even out the volume changes. I use that trick myself. I set it so that the SC will get some good crunch if I really dig into chords, but clean up when I lay off a bit. Then if I want more grit, or to fill out and distort single-note lines I can switch to the HB (or a series combination of SCs).

But the OP is trying to get a clean tone out of the HB without it being much louder than the clean SC. Thus the thread...
 
ashcat_lt said:
Firstly, that's a bit of a strange statement. There is no compression inherent in any passive pickup. It is true that a humbucker will usually hit the compression/overdrive "ceiling" of an amplifier sooner or easier than a single coil because it's just plain louder. And yes, if you set the amp so that the SC is already into that region, then it can't get as much louder as it otherwise might. It will tend to "fill out" and get more distorted when you switch to the HB, but it can sort of even out the volume changes. I use that trick myself. I set it so that the SC will get some good crunch if I really dig into chords, but clean up when I lay off a bit. Then if I want more grit, or to fill out and distort single-note lines I can switch to the HB (or a series combination of SCs).

But the OP is trying to get a clean tone out of the HB without it being much louder than the clean SC. Thus the thread...
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It may be a strange statement, yes, and compression in the pickup may not be the best way to describe it so much as the fact that it changes the way the amp compresses when you play, but that's been my experience as a player - for whatever reason I've always found that humbuckers have a more even dynamic response whereas singlecoils are a lot easier to work the output by varying up your pick attack. It most likely IS the fact singlecoils are brighter and lower output than humbuckers and don't have as thick a low end, but my experience has been that at a given amp setting, a little extra gain will help smooth out the singlecoil pickups and add a tiny bit of grit, but a low-to-medium output humbucker won't necessarily sound much more distorted than the singlecoil, and what grit there is will mostly be in a somewhat murky low end, which isn't going to cut through live anyway.

And I'm talking maybe SRV-plays-R&B-Jimi-isms levels of grit here, not AC/DC crunch. Just a little bit of sparkle and glassiness on the attack, not much more, unless you REALLY hammer the strings.
 
Set the amp up with the humbuckers engaged, volume knobs on the guitar at about 7. Turn up for extra gain and/or when splitting. I started doing that with the Traditional Pro for pretty much the reason you described, now it's standard practice. If the volume knob gets things muddy as you turn down, solder in a treble bleed across the lugs.
 
DrewPeterson7 said:
And I'm talking maybe SRV-plays-R&B-Jimi-isms levels of grit here, not AC/DC crunch. Just a little bit of sparkle and glassiness on the attack, not much more, unless you REALLY hammer the strings.
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I really want CLEAN clean, though, no distortion at all. I have four channels of varying amounts and types of distortion, so what I really want here is something with no distortion at all. And I can't really do that anyway, as in this case, my "clean channel" is actually just an EQ pedal, so there's no way to drive the input of it, at least no way that would be remotely pleasing. I started doing things that way because I just could not jive with the clean sounds of my Roadster - all this time, I really just wanted a solid state sound for cleans, and the EQ is far more flexible to dial in exactly what I want.

I have tried a couple things in the interim here - I added a treble bleed circuit, a very mild one, to keep in more of the treble as I turn down, and I also added a resistor in series with the coil tap lines to ground, as PRS does on their modern guitars, so that the grounded out coil isn't fully grounded, giving me a little extra volume and a little less noise. Still isn't quite even, though...

The suggestions have so far been good, it's just tough because I always want one solution that will work no matter which guitar I bring to a show and there never seems to be only one solution. The last suggestion, about playing with the volume controls more, makes sense, but it doesn't pan out for the one song where I really need the levels to match because I am switching between super clean and full on heavy metal distortion as instantaneously as possible in that song, so I really need the humbucker to be cranked and it is a pain to try to roll it back while also trying to switch channels and flip a chorus pedal on. I suppose I could try to flip to the other pickup while doing all that, but I would then have to set my EQ a bit louder for clean sounds and roll back the volumes on all the fuzz and distortiony sorts of pedals that precede it, and the other guitar I normally use only has one volume control instead of two, though I can set the single coils and humbuckers to either match in volume or not, so that may not be a problem. I just don't know...
 
Stop playing clean. Clean sucks. Problem solved. :)

If I'm reading your stuff right, this is what I'd do/try in your situation....

I'd use a guitar with independent pickup and vol controls and an easy to get to selector switch - like a Les Paul or something with a similar arrangement. So set up an amp channel that's very loud, bright, and just barely a hair dirty, and have the guitar ready with the neck pickup vol rolled way back and the bridge humbucker at full power. Then for your clean neck pickup sounds, you stomp to that channel, and switch to the neck pickup. Having the neck single coils vol rolled back will negate the tube breakup but keep most of the volume. Instant clean. Then with a stomp of the footswitch and a flip of the pickup switch you're back to full bridge humbucker on a dirty channel.

Side note, I just tried this real quick with my Les Paul - neck pickup split to a single and rolled way back - and my Marshall JVM410 (4 channels of awesome). Seemed to work great.
 
Greg_L said:
Stop playing clean. Clean sucks. Problem solved. :)

If I'm reading your stuff right, this is what I'd do/try in your situation....

I'd use a guitar with independent pickup and vol controls and an easy to get to selector switch - like a Les Paul or something with a similar arrangement. So set up an amp channel that's very loud, bright, and just barely a hair dirty, and have the guitar ready with the neck pickup vol rolled way back and the bridge humbucker at full power. Then for your clean neck pickup sounds, you stomp to that channel, and switch to the neck pickup. Having the neck single coils vol rolled back will negate the tube breakup but keep most of the volume. Instant clean. Then with a stomp of the footswitch and a flip of the pickup switch you're back to full bridge humbucker on a dirty channel.

Side note, I just tried this real quick with my Les Paul - neck pickup split to a single and rolled way back - and my Marshall JVM410 (4 channels of awesome). Seemed to work great.
Click to expand...

This particular guitar does have separate volumes. I find that way more useful than the normal Vol-Tone-Tone most Strats have. We played a frat party recently where I didn't want to bring my full rig, so I just brought my OR15 and a 112 and used the two volumes exactly for that purpose. Generally, though, the problem I have with that method is that a) I don't like the sound of the OR15 as much and b) I don't like how my dirt sounds sound when cleaned up. So I generally have very different EQ settings from one to the other. I would say that there is really only about one clean sound I really like, whereas there are many, many dirt sounds I like, so I am more particular about getting the clean right. So I'm not opposed to using the guitar volumes more (and in fact, I do actually like doing that), but I have so many other things like fuzz pedals and the like to run that it doesn't give me the flexibility I want.

I'm doing away with this silly EQ as my clean channel nonsense. It was kind of ridiculous and wasn't really offering any improvements over the amp's clean settings once I turned the amp up. Maybe I'll just work the clean channel's gain knob between songs then and mark my settings. Though I'm sure I will drink too much and forget to change them once I get on stage...
 
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thebigcheese said:
I would then have to set my EQ a bit louder for clean sounds and roll back the volumes on all the fuzz and distortiony sorts of pedals that precede it, and the other guitar I normally use only has one volume control instead of two, though I can set the single coils and humbuckers to either match in volume or not, so that may not be a problem. I just don't know...
Click to expand...

That's the way it's done. You select the neck pickup (in your case, with the coil split), set up your amp as distorted and bright as you will ever need, then start turning stuff down from there. Your instantaneous change would be affected by playing clean on one pickup, and making the adjustments required on the other pickup proactively, so the change would be solely a flip of a switch at the proper moment.

The only other option is a midi controlled preamp or a modeller.
 
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