Recently used 50's wiring for the first time in a new guitar and i love it. How the fuck is modern wiring even a thing? Who the fuck wants their highs rolled off when lowering the volume?
This weekend i'll be changing all my guitars to 50's wiring. Simple to do so shouldnt take to long. If you haven't tried it, do yourself a favour.
It's better than nothing, I think. But, probably thanks to a decade of familiarity, I still found myself preferring a volume with a high-pass capacitor to 50s wiring, because to my ears I still found I was getting some treble rolloff when rolling the volume back, while with a cap the treble response seemed much more natural to me. That said, one man's "natural" may be another's "bright," and either is a big improvement over "nothing at all" if you like to use your volume knob to control gain, like I do (and, presumably, you do too).
But yeah, it's absolutely worth a try if you're playing a guitar with nothing in the wiring intended to preserve treble as you roll off the volume. :yesway:
I am the one who told Drew to try 50's wiring :lol: I personally love it. Its how I wire all my guitars. I dont care for the way that a treble bleed mod will change the taper of the pot so I go with 50's style wiring in everything.
I tried the treble bleed mod a while back but found it removed some of the low end aswell as highs when lowering the volume. Soudned wuite weird on lower vol settings. My main humbuckered guitar has no tone pot and i love how it sounds when lowering the volume, but on this new guitar i'm using p90s and was a bit worried about the highs so i installed a tone pot. Pretty damn happy with how the 50's wiring works with it.
Honestly, this makes a lot of sense to me - I think either a treble cap or 50s wiring is a vast improvement over "standard" wiring, but which one you prefer is going to come down to personal preference and familiarity. That said - different cap values, or the addition of a resistor, can definitely have a huge impact on the taper so you can change the treble balance quite a bit on a treble cap setup... but if right out of the box the 50s wiring approach is giving you results you like, why bother?
One of these two solutions should be mandatory on all guitars with volume pots, though, for sure, and this is definitely the easiest to try and requires the fewest additional parts. :yesway:
I tried the treble bleed mod a while back but found it removed some of the low end aswell as highs when lowering the volume. Soudned wuite weird on lower vol settings. My main humbuckered guitar has no tone pot and i love how it sounds when lowering the volume, but on this new guitar i'm using p90s and was a bit worried about the highs so i installed a tone pot. Pretty damn happy with how the 50's wiring works with it.
What resistor/cap values are you using on your treble bleed? Just compared the no tone to a 50's wiring and i am hearing some high end roll off still. Might give the treble bleed another shot. I've got spare cap/resistors around to try and the guitars open so why the hell not?!
If I recall correctly the total values are similar to what you find in American Pro Strats:
Then, there is the Ibanez Treble bleed. They use a straight 330pf (Pico Farad) cap with a 500kB pot. I believe this is because just the cap changes the taper of the pot some so they use a B taper pot which is linear instead of the normal A taper which is a logarithmic taper also called an audio taper.
Awesome, thanks mate. Last time i tried the treble bleed i think i copied stewmacs values. BUt i've since read there more ways to skin that cat. I'll read through this a bit later cheers!
Just had a thought that will solve my tone issues. No load pots. If i use one of those with 50's wiring i can have the brightness i prefer when lowering the vol (with tone pot maxed). And then if i lower the tone that will use the 50's wiring (when lowering the vol).
This does seem like a pretty good idea for more jazzy, classic rock kind of stuff. For the past 15+ plus years, I mainly just play METAL, so I don't even bother with a tone knob for the most part. Neither of the last two guitars I bought have tone knobs, though some of the guitars I've been eying lately do have them. I owned a Gibson Les Paul Studio from about 2002 to 2012 that I always played with both volume and tone at 10 whenever with a band, but I'd still mess with values less than 10 by myself and I thought a Gibson Les Paul with the neck pickup tone at 2-5 sounded pretty nice for jazzy leads or more classic rock low to mid gain leads, and from the videos I've seen of 50s wiring, it's also nice and in a different kind of way.
Same metal player for 20+ yrs, then i started building guitars pedals 2yrs back. First pedal i built was a fuzz face, was shocked for two reasons. 1st) When i rolled off the vol on the guitar the distortion turned to crystal clean sounds 2nd) the texture of the FF distortion was unlike anything id heard before. So i built another pedal.. and another, ect.. now ive got 18 different drive/fuzz pedals and it has totally changed the way i play. I now use edge of breakup lead tones and then i kick on a fuzz to get crazy wailing distortion.
After that break though i decided to build a telecaster. So i could get a different sound from my normal hot humbucker guitars, ive heard singlcoils are more touch sensitive to playing styles, and yes they are. I've now stared playing without a pick, the tele has become my number one player. And this yr a built 2 guitars one Jazzmaster with p90's and a superstart which will get a set of Paf's. For even more tonal options.
Still consider myself a metalhead/player and is still crank the AFX2 with the savage amp model and get my thrash on but man its so much fun stacking drives/fuzzes with a low output pickup. There is a whole other world of tones/texture that i wasnt aware of playing through a high gain amps.
But with the singlecoils and P90-'s you really do need to consider having a tone knob, they are just to bright otherwise, that lead me to the 50's wiring.
That's also why there are some guitars with not just no tone knobs, but no volume knobs either. They usually just have a killswitch button, so the volume options are either 0 or 10.
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