Paddy wrote:
I already have EMG Afterburner in the Strat to help give an overall variable boost. 2 reasons for this. First is to give the bridge pickup a bit of a boost compared to the other pups(pickup height of bridge is already much higher then neck an middle).
Always balance your pickups first, apply boost to bring the level of the whole guitar up. Before manufacturers started winding the bridge pups hotter we would end up with neck flush with the pickguard and middle just a little higher. If that's what it takes...
Noiseless designs are relatively low gauss (magnet strength) and are extremely sensitive to pickup height adjustment. You can get a big difference in tone just by how you adjust them. Closer to the strings will have more edge and punch and they will mellow when you back them off. Some designs (notably Kinmans) a half turn of the screw can make a world of difference. So spend some time experimenting with that before you look into changing things.
If, once you have adjusted them to your liking and so they are balanced, the output is still too low,
then you apply boost. And compared to even a vintage humbucker, a s/c guitar will
almost always be relatively low output - that's one of the reasons they sound different (and why some of us play them). Put in hotter pickups and active boosters and you wipe out some of the difference that makes a Strat sound like a Strat.
Having said that, if you do end up wanting a thicker, more midrangey tone consider swapping out your Afterburner with a Clapton Mid Boost circuit - that's exactly what it's made for.
Thing is, as soon as you engage the afterburner there is a slight increase in brightness and that gets slightly more prevalent the more you turn up the boost, been told its because of the ceramic magnets
Sure, ceramic mags can be shrill, but if it was the magnets, the tone would not change when you activated the pre - that's down to the tonality of the pre itself and the fact that any pre outputs a low impedance signal (so less treble is lost to the cables).
But the bridge and middle is so much more brighter then the neck (The neck is bass heavy, almost bucker like). So when I switch from neck to bright it becomes quite shrill because of the setting I need to use for the neck.
To some degree, that's a Strat thing. I've never been a Strat bridge pickup fan (or middle for that matter) but change them too much and you kill the 'tween settings (which are exactly my kind of thing).
What about putting a capacitor between bridge pup and the switch to remove treble?
Sure. Possible - combine with a preset pot and you can basically set it up as a preset tone setting. Add in a SuperSwitch and you can have different tone caps in different switch settings. The possibilities are endless. Still, first prize is always getting things right with a minimum of complexity.
