Balance between two humbuckers with different impedance

10/4/2004 10:17 PM

Borsanova

Balance between two humbuckers with different impedance Hello,   I have a question about blending different pickups in a Les Paul. I couldn't find anything on this argument anywhere else on the Net.     I recently bought an Epiphone Les Paul. Different from most Epiphone critics, I really liked the sound of the stock pickups, especially the neck (they are both Zebras; does anybody know if these are better than normal Epiphone pickups?). But I wanted to try something different and install a push-pull pot to permit phase reverse (which is quite different with the two-lead stock pickups). So I installed a DiMarzio Fred in the bridge position. According to their website, this pickup has 10,07k impedance and it gives actually a much harder edge than the Epiphone.   But what I found is that it blends pretty poorly with the Zebra on the neck. I expected the Fred to be louder, but when I put the pickup-selector in the middle position the opposite is the case and I hear only the neck-pickup which is completely covering the other one. I have to reduce the volume knob of the neck pickup by at least one point to start hearing some signal of the Fred. I tried to correct it by lowering the neck pickup, but I soon reached the limit with little use.   The neck pickup should have about 7k and it seems to me that, due to the different impedance, most of the signal chooses its way on the lower resistance path through the neck pickup and very little actually passes through the 10k Fred.   Is this logical? If it is, most guitars with a hotter pickup on the bridge (let's say 7,5k on the neck and 14k on the bridge) should have the same or even bigger problems. What do guitar builders about this?     I do like to have three different tones immediately and currently I get this only by reducing the neck volume or by using the out-of-phase mode, which in fact gives a much better blend.     Thanks for any comment