A Brighter Guitar
Don't just stand there! Write your mind »
SUMMARY: Advice regarding brightening-up your Les Paul-type guitar, which applies to most dark wood made, humbucker-equipped guitars.
WARNING: Many of the suggestions below will void your guitar's and parts' warranty. Use discretion. Use a guitar technician when you get out of your depth.
Introduction
Many guitarists run into this issue: they end-up with a guitar that is simply too dark, sometimes so dark it's actually muddy. This is the result of inexperienced or beginner guys buying badly built and badly setup guitars.
What is "darkness" when we speak of a dark guitar? To my ear (and understanding), a dark guitar sounds bassy, tends to accent the lower mids, and tends to significantly diminish the upper mids and highs. If this is an otherwise good guitar, the tone will be a mellow, warm, deep one. If it is a poor guitar, as it's sometimes the case with cheap instruments, these characteristics will yield a lifeless, articulation-lacking tone. If you take this to the extreme, you get a practically unusable tone, known as mud -- because that's the impression it gives: a poorly defined pulp of sound lacking any personality and articulation, most likely useless for even the most aggresive musical styles. Therefore, absolutely no guitarist actually looks for a muddy sound, and we all try to get rid of it by fixing our guitars.
The tonal characteristic of any guitar starts with the wood. Different woods, in different combinations, have different tonal characteristics. You can test this by playing your electric unplugged and listen to the purely acoustic tone. A Mahogany guitar will always sound darker than an Alder one. This is a given. In the following we will assume you already have your guitar, thus changing the woods is made of is not a practical option. Let's see what else can be done, sometimes with minimal cost and huge effect, in order to brighten-up your electric guitar.
I'll take it from the beginning to the end of the tone chain, except the player. Although it is said the player is the main factor influencing tone, and I hold this to be true, there's no way that playing technique alone can turn a muddy-sounding guitar into a lively instrument. Granted, I'd still listen to Guthrie Govan playing on the poorest sounding Squire starter pack, rather than putting up with a beginner tormenting a custom shop guitar on a state-of-the-art rig.
The further you get from the origin of the signal (the string vibration inducing current in the pickups) without having solved the brightness problem, the poorer the end results, when you'll find yourself compensating with EQ pedals and boards. It shouldn't get to that. Those are meant for fine-tuning the tone, not creating the tone.
Strings
The lighter the gauge, the brighter the sound. This is mostly due to thinning of the tone, and loss of lower range, not to accenting the highs, thus there is some overall tone sacrifice going on. Using bright bronze strings is not an option on electrics.
Cost: minimal
Brightening factor: minimal
DYI difficulty: basic
Pickup covers
The debate on whether or not pickup covers dull your tone is still raging on. To my ear, this A/B testing shows beyond any doubt that open humbuckers have a perceptibly brighter tone, and more "bite". There's a long string of famous players who took the covers off their Les Pauls for this exact effect, before bare humbuckers where "cool". The difference is enough for removing the covers to be worthy. It's a subtle thing, but it's there and it helps.
The duller tone with covers is due to stray capacitance between the pickup and the cover, leaking high frequencies into ground, therefore losing them.
WARNING: The covers are also supposed to protect the coils from outer interference, so you might get some after removing them, if you're playing in such an environment. Also, although the operation itself is very easy to perform, you may still damage the pickup by applying to much heat when de-soldering the cover, or by sloppy or rough manipulation of the coils.
Cost: zero
Brightening factor: minimal
DYI difficulty: average
Pickup adjustments
The Golden Rule: lower your pickups, raise the pole screws.
This will give you more of a natural sound, less compressed, brighter, better defined, at the expense of some volume loss. The difference may be so dramatic for a poorly factory set-up guitar that the tone will change entirely after the adjustment. Do not overlook this! It is of immense importance, and may spare you a lot of frustration and money.
This article is a good starting point, but make sure you use your ear. Also, a volume meter in your recording software might provide some visual aid for getting the volume right. There are no other rules, but what sounds good to you. I.e., Slash lowers some of his pickups as far as 5.5 mm at the neck, and about 3 mm at the bridge, completely off Gibson's recommended values of about 2.4 mm and 1.6 mm, respectively.
Do this!
Cost: zero
Brightening factor: significant
DYI difficulty: easy
Pickup upgrade
You can refer to the manufacturer's EQ values for the pickup to get an idea about how bright the humbucker will sound. Listen to sound samples, from the manufacturer and from third parties (i.e., YouTube videos). But keep in mind that the pickup may sound nothing like you've heard when placed in your guitar. It's never a precise shot, you have to go ahead based on whatever little information you can gather.
WARNING: a pickup upgrade should be the last thing to consider for the sole purpose of getting a brighter tone! Read further for explanations.
Cost: significant
Brightening factor: decisive
DYI difficulty: advanced
Electronics
This is so often overlooked, and people spend so much time and money on pickups only to return to the same frustration until they address the issue of the circuitry. Don't even consider a pickup upgrade until you made sure your other electronics are as they should be.
Wiring modes
There are many ways to wire a Les Paul-type guitar, most common being the 50's style and the modern style. There are advantages and disadvantages to both, and it's one of those endless issues on forums, but ultimately it is for the player to decide. However, if your main problem is the annoying loss of brightness (highs) when turning down the volume knob on the guitar, go with the 50's wiring. Switching from modern (or some exotic -- and usually stupid stock wiring) to the 50's wiring makes a world of difference, so don't ignore this.
Potentiometers
Their role is capital. They are basically variable resistors in the volume and tone circuits. Their defining parameter is resistance, in the Kilo-Ohms territory. The standard value for humbuckers is 500K. Anything lower gives you mud and loss of articulation. As simple as that.
For extra brightness you might attempt:
1. Installing 1M potentiometers
Cost: small
Brightening factor: significant
DYI difficulty: advanced
2. Getting/modding true-bypass/no-load potentiometers -- meaning that when they are fully open (on 10), they are actually out of the circuit altogether. John Cooper (of Korg) illustrates the mod, which is very simple to do. This will only help brightness with the knob on 10, not below.
Cost: zero (if you don't break the pot...)
Brightening factor: minimal
DYI difficulty: average
Capacitors
Along with the tone pots, capacitors make a low-pass filter, draining treble (high frequencies) into ground according to their capacitance and the associated potentiometer setting. The most important thing to consider here is the capacitance.
The Golden Rule: The lower the capacitance value, the more treble (brightness) in the tone.
The Gibson standard for Les Pauls is to use .022µF capacitors. If that is too dark, switch to .015µF or .010µF, possibly different values for neck and bridge. John Cooper has an excellent test of capacitance values you can refer to. I've had an Asian-made humbucker guitar with .047µF capacitors in the tone circuit. The tone was pretty much unusable under 10, and the little that was there required radical amp settings.
Do note that this will influence tone only with the knob lower than 10 (at least in theory, unless you have a true-bypass pot).
Some people swear by capacitor material influencing the tone, namely using the more expensive PIO (Paper In Oil) capacitors instead of the cheap stock ceramics. You might get on that side of the fence after listening to the samples here. However, for the sole purpose of brightness this might be irrelevant.
Other mods
Normally used in some Fenders, the Greasebucket (a sort of treble-bleed) circuit helps with balancing the lows when rolling down the highs with the tone knob. It's simple, and can be ported to Les Paul-type wirings. Never done it myself, though. Also useful only when working the tone knob below 10.
A possibly more convenient, but more expensive option is to buy a prewired harness (pots, capacitors, switches, already wired together, you just need to solder your pickups on it). Make sure it fits the specs outlined above.
Cost: minimal, but pottentially significant if buying pre-made harnesses, or high-end pots and capacitors
Brightening factor: decisive
DYI difficulty: advanced
Cables
Cables introduce their own capacitance in the circuit. Cable capacitance increases with length. It kills brightness. There are more expensive low-capacity cables available, but are you that far down the brightness chain and still unhappy with your guitar? Have you done/checked all of the above? Doubtful.
Cost: may get significant
Brightening factor: variable
DYI difficulty: n/a
Pedals, amplifier and cabinets
This is a no brainer. Select a brighter amp, such as the notoriously jangly and sparkly Vox AC30, with its legendary cleans. Really get into setting up its EQ. Use a smaller, open cabinet. Buy an EQ pedal, dial in some treble, remove some lows.
But if you find yourself relying to much on this final station in the signal journey, if you constantly have to fiddle with your amp and pedal knobs and sliders and there's still something missing, get back to the beginning, start over.
Cost: significant
Brightening factor: decisive
DYI difficulty: n/a
Conclusion
To sum it up, this time in order of importance and impact:
- Check and upgrade your electronics. They are the back-bone. Crappy electronics equals crappy tone overall.
- Adjust your pickups. This only comes second because pickups rely so much on what comes after them -- the other electronics.
- Upgrade your pickups.
- Get a bright amp and an EQ pedal.
- Remove your pickup covers.
- Consider a low capacitance cable.
- Go down a step in string gauge.
After all these you might still not be happy with the gain in brightness, or the price of getting there is to high, either financially, or in terms of work and patience. There are two possible ways to go: either your guitar is truly a very poorly made instrument that can't be helped (this actually occurs much more rarely than you might think), or a Les Paul-type machine is actually not for you. You might have thought it is, with all the subliminal influence provided by your Gibson-wielding guitar heroes, but you're actually a Stratocaster/Telecaster guy, and would be much happier playing on one of those -- brighter woods, single coils. Consider it.
I find it important to have a properly set-up guitar that will inspire you to pick it up and play, hence this entire article which I hope you'll find useful. Although your fingers won't make your guitar inherently brighter, tone is in the fingers, still. So go set-up your instrument and play it.
No comments so far.
