anyone else notice this? i think i'm gonna have to put in a Fender TBX knob to take out some of the excess bass until i can afford better pickups.

well, i have a RG7621, which i believe has the same stock pickups. i play through a little crate 15 watter, and they sound great to me.

of course, that amp doesn't have much bass response.

you mean to increase the high end a little bit? the TBX is a neat device, but the only way it increases the high end is to effectively remove the tone control from the circuit when it's turned all the way up [all tone controls suck off a tiny bit of highs even when cranked].

a cheaper way to achieve this would be to unsolder your existing tone control. you'll get that tiny bit of highs back, and it would sound the same as it would with a cranked TBX. the downside of course is that you can't ever turn the tone control down.

you might also check the height of your pickups from the strings, and raise them up a little bit -- that will almost always brighten the response.

I always thought the opposite, Scott... lowering them would lower the "compression" from the pickup signal hitting the preamp, and give an airier high end?

Either way, I'd say hold on the tone control. I have one in my Strat, and while I can hear the difference, I'd rather just have a full tone knob taper at my disposal. It's subtle, and it makes the actual "tone" rolloff much more sensitive because it's happening in half the space. Once you get some better pickups, it's probably not something you'll want.

-D

Yeah, I didn't want to say, because Scott's a pretty smart guy, but generally the lows and low mids thicken as you get the pickup closer to the strings. That's why pulling Tone Zones down relieves some of the low end pressure. But the higher output from a raised pickup might make harmonics a little easier and the attack a little sharper that you'd perceive it as a brightening. In MW's case I'd say he has the "Tone Zone problem" and lowering the pickups would help. Also adjusting the bass side down leaving the treble side up would be fine too. Then you can also lower the pole pieces in conjunction with the muddiest strings. On the bridge pickup I would raise the poles from the treble coil up about 1/16" out of the bobbin, and flush out the bass coil. You could do the same on the neck pickup but it will have less of an effect.

Taking the tone out restores some of the highs, yes. But it doesn't remove thick muddy bass, so it's only half the equation. It's all good to try though. Even an active mid boost with lowered pickups would do nice things.

you're wrong on this part. the TBX, being a passive control, can only cut frequencies. what it does is when you turn it one way, it cuts treble, like a normal tone knob. when you turn it the other way, it cuts bass. this is NOT the same as taking it out of the circuit. in the middle is a small notch where it's effectively taken out of the circuit completely, the same as if you desoldered it (which i normally do anyway).

you're wrong on this part. the TBX, being a passive control, can only cut frequencies. what it does is when you turn it one way, it cuts treble, like a normal tone knob. when you turn it the other way, it cuts bass. this is NOT the same as taking it out of the circuit. in the middle is a small notch where it's effectively taken out of the circuit completely, the same as if you desoldered it (which i normally do anyway).

yep. i did this to my RG570. pumped some life into the sound

"Did it pump some life into your sound?" Or did it add brightness and treble and decrease bass? Just curious.

Actually, as I understand it, the TBX tone control is a 500k pot soldiered on top of a 1000k pot. The center detent is the "max" setting from the 500k tone pot (or maybe the figures here are 250 and 500k- whichever is typical for fender is the smaller figure), and from that midpoint down, the tone control behaves normally. Above that point, though, the knob begins to blend the signal with the higher 1000k tone pot, allowing additional high frequencies to pass through.

I'm not 100% sure I have the figures left, and it might entirely bypass the tone control when you max it all the way out at 10- i can't remember, and Fender's sight absolutely blows in terms of user friendliness- it took me 5 minutes to even find their "guitar" page- but I can tell you with absolute certianty, speaking as a guy who has a TBX tone control wired in with the Lace Sensors on his strat, that it does NOT cut bass as you roll it up past the center detent.

Try lowering your pickups for starters, to get buy until you make a swap.

-D

i know how the TBX works, i've got one in one of my guitars, and i've done extensive research on the subject.....and i can tell you with absolute certainty, speaking as a guy who has a TBX tone control wired in with the DiMarzios on his Talon, that it DOES cut bass as you roll it up past the center detent.

in my best phynglish, the magnetic force drops off as 1 over r cubed. so, in raising the pickups closer to the strings, the oscillating magnetic field from the vibrating strings exerts a stronger force on the coil of wire around each pole in the pickups, inducing a higher current, and thereby generally increasing the signal.

in english, the pickups sounded hotter. i got more response out of them, and the sound was generally increased. i didn't note any change in the separate levels of bass or treble. but, that would be an interesting experiment

That's why I brought it up, because the post is about the pickups being muddy and you were endorsing raising them, but we kind of felt that was counterproductive in this guy's case. No biggie, generally you would want the pickup higher.

no, i'm not.

that is correct, and that's why i said that the tiny increase in highs is due to the tone circuit being removed, not due to any sort of boost. i even cut out the word 'boost' so no one would think i was talking about an active component.

you must be thinking about something else. the detent in the TBX is the point where it acts like a standard tone knob turned all the way up. turning down cuts the treble, but turning up uses the ganged pot [Drew, i think it's 1 Megaohm] to make the resistance so high that the tone control is effectively removed.

Fender did replace the TBX with a different name and new design in the late 90s at some point -- perhaps you're thinking of that. i don't remember anything about that other design except that it was quite different, so maybe that's the pot that cuts treble one way and bass the other.

interesting. i recently put a TZ7 in one of my 7620s and it was painfully shrill on the high end. i lowered it down a lot and it softened a bit, but i wasn't paying much attention to changes in the low end, just trying to ease the icepick-in-the-ear.

i was surprised the TZ7 didn't sound very good in the 7620, after the many jemsite recommendations. it may be that my amps are all tweaked bright for my 2027/TZ7 and 540S7/Duncan Custom.

Did some searching on the net- Fender describes the TBX as cutting treble one way and bass the other in their literature, while guys describing it from a hardware perspective seem to be discussing it's function cloer to the way i understand it; gradually mixing in some additional high end gained by lowering the resistance in the tone pot from 250k up to 1000k. Either way, there's certianly no loss in bass frequencies as i turn it from 5 to 10 on my strat- granted, a strat isn't the most bass-heavy guitar in the world to begin with, but I'm hearing an icnrease in presence, not a decrease in bass.

I'm guessing that Fender chose to describe it as such in reference to the bass seeming to decrease relative to the treble, rather than actually tapering the bass off as you use it, as the way it's designed, there's no possible way i can see that it'd cut "actual" bass frequencies. My ears confirm this, as well.

-D