Artist Award Pickups (Revisited)

[GuildAAPlayer]

We talked about this in a thread started in Dec 08 -- viewtopic.php?f=3&t=10708

The issue, to my ears, is to get a more rounded sound from the post-DeArmond / pre-Benedetto Artist Award Model pickups. On both my amps, an Evans JE-200 and a JazzKat, I've normally had to set the treble control all the way down to zero to cut back on what is an overly bright tone.

I've been using a Benedetto S-6 pickup for the past few months and think it was a fine improvement, but the guitar is still too much on the bright side with flat tone settings on the amp. The Benedetto circuit installation instruction sheet specifies a 250K ohm potentiometer. The stock Guild AA pot is 500K (mine was actually 470K as measured). So, for the next step, I ordered a 250K (250K actual) mini-pot.

(It looks like 250K ohm is the industry standard for single coil pickups, and 500K for humbuckers.)

I've swapped back to the original AA pickup, but with the new 250K potentiometer. The difference is very significant; much more than I would have imagined. Amp treble controls can be left in mid-range and the tone is still warm and fat! Also, when backing off on the guitar volume control, the treble of the output tone is further attenuated -- and, I think, considerably more so than it was with the original AA volume pot.

I may someday test the Benedetto S-6 with the 250K volume pot, but with the stock pickup sounding so dramatically different, I'll probably spend a lot more time with it this way -- at least long enough to test it through a couple of my other favorite string sets. Honestly, if I'd discovered this simple tone alteration much earlier, I probably wouldn't have considered shopping for an aftermarket pickup in the first place.

George

 

[AlohaJoe]

I posted this link before in another thread, but Rik Wright talks about using 250k pots with humbuckers here:
http://www.rikwright.com/Content/Content.aspx?page=custom&pgid=280

To quote the relevant part of the article:

I employ the craftsmanship of Eric Miller of Hands on Guitars exclusively for set-ups, electronics installations and custom repair work. With Eric's guidance I have learned a lot of tricks that have helped me find my unique sound. One of these is the installation of 250k pots in most of my instruments, instead of the standard 500k pots. We will often combine this along with installing a bridge pick-up in the neck position to get a deeper, warmer and softer tone with extremely clear definition of each string of the instrument.

The rest of the article is worth a look also if you haven't seen it.

 

[Chris Metcalfe]

I suspect that why this works particularly well is that the original AA ( post dearmond) pickup has a resistance that is about half that of a normal humbucker or P90, more like a gretsch filtertron - so arguably it should have a pot value even lower than 250k, to match its low resistance.
I'm glad you've had some luck with the original pickup - like many AA owners I have replaced it. It has a good clear sound, but to my ears it suffers from very low output and poor string balance, both from bottom to top, and with that annoying overemphasised B string. The low output does mean, unfortunately, that lowering the pot value makes the output even lower. I have tried an ebay dearmond 1100, which looks the part and has that 'original ' vibe, but the trouble with that is that the resistance is so high at 17k that it can sound muddy.
I've ended up with a KA single-coil, which looks utilitarian but sounds pretty good.
Now, what can I do with that dearmond 1100.........?
Chris