ampage Tube Amps / Music Electronics	For current discussions, please visit Music Electronics Forum.

ampage archive

Vintage threads from the first ten years

previous: FredG Just thinking - W... -- 8/23/2000 9:01 PM

Re: Tele musing

8/24/2000 1:42 PM
Mark Hammer	Re: Tele musing Depends how you use the guitar and what you play it through. If you play through a maximum sparkle rig, then anything you allow to emerge up front stands a better chance of making it all the way through the signal chain to someone's ears. If you have a cheap 50ft cord, run it through a Big Muff and chorus, and feed it into a 4 x 12 stack, I don't think you'll detect any improvement. If you're game, you could always consider replacing the 3-way with a 5-way, and use positions 2 and 4, and one of the switch's poles, to engage/disengage the tone control. This could give you not only tone-bypass for the neck, but for the bridge as well. The way to do it would be to wire in the pickups as front and bridge on one set of contacts, and wire up the lead from the tone control that normally goes to the volume control AS IF it were the middle pickup, on the other set of contacts. This way, for the 3 middle positions, the tone control would be functional, but throw the switch fully forward or fully back and the tone control is out of circuit. Finally, important to remember that the tone is normally effective for both pickups, since it is connected to the input of the volume control shared by both pickups. The only ways to disconnect the neck only from the tone would be to have a switch for the tone control specifically (separate toggle, push-pull pot, etc), or have a selector that keeps track of both the tone control and pickup selection, and is wired to manage both concurrently.

8/24/2000 1:42 PM

Mark Hammer

Re: Tele musing

Depends how you use the guitar and what you play it through. If you play through a maximum sparkle rig, then anything you allow to emerge up front stands a better chance of making it all the way through the signal chain to someone's ears. If you have a cheap 50ft cord, run it through a Big Muff and chorus, and feed it into a 4 x 12 stack, I don't think you'll detect any improvement.

If you're game, you could always consider replacing the 3-way with a 5-way, and use positions 2 and 4, and one of the switch's poles, to engage/disengage the tone control. This could give you not only tone-bypass for the neck, but for the bridge as well. The way to do it would be to wire in the pickups as front and bridge on one set of contacts, and wire up the lead from the tone control that normally goes to the volume control AS IF it were the middle pickup, on the other set of contacts. This way, for the 3 middle positions, the tone control would be functional, but throw the switch fully forward or fully back and the tone control is out of circuit.

Finally, important to remember that the tone is normally effective for both pickups, since it is connected to the input of the volume control shared by both pickups. The only ways to disconnect the neck only from the tone would be to have a switch for the tone control specifically (separate toggle, push-pull pot, etc), or have a selector that keeps track of both the tone control and pickup selection, and is wired to manage both concurrently.