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What makes guitars sound dark?


Husafreak

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bridge, finish, wood, build quality, individual pickups (they are made to be consistent, but each pickup has its own unique voice, whether audible or not), fretboard, amount of glue joints, string material, string age, environment, pickup distance from strings....

about 100000 things.

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With passive electronics, it's a combination of the pickups themselves, the tone pots (250kOhm is darker than 500kOhm), and the tone capacitors (higher capacitance values like 47pF are darker than lower values like 22pF).

 

You can see these principles in action if you compare the traditional wiring schemes of strats and les pauls. Strats start out with very bright pickups, so they're wired with 250kOhm tone pots and .047uF tone capacitors. Les pauls start with relatively darker humbuckers, so they were given 500kOhm pots and .022uF capacitors.

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That Steinberger is basically a guitar neck with a couple of wings glued on. I'm not sure which model you have, but if it's mostly maple, that would explain why it sounds dark. Most people think that maple adds brightness, but, according to at least one source:

 

Maple, as a result of its greater weight and lower sound velocity, can be downright flat sounding, a blessing in disguise when a guitar is amplified at high sound pressure levels. This is why maple is the wood of choice for electric guitar tops

 

By the way, don't let anybody tell you that your tone is primarily the result of pickups, caps, and pots. If that were true, my Jaguar would sound exactly like my Stratocaster, because they both have SC pickups with about the same output and the same value caps and pots. Both are alder with rosewood boards and maple necks, yet, they couldn't sound more different.

 

The same is true of my Les Paul and my ES339. They have identical pickups, necks--even the bodies are the same size--but the tone is very different. The design and the materials have a lot more influence on tone then most players are willing to admit.

 

Most players do not understand active pickups either. They think that because they have built in preamps, they overpower and mask the true sound of the instrument. However, because of their ability to reproduce a wider frequency and dynamic range, they actually reveal the properties of the guitar's tonewood and design characteristics quite well, probably better than lo-fi passives.

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100000 is a lot! I will try (if they are not allready in there) 500kOhm pots and .022uF caps to brighten the Steinberger sound. But they are active pickups... better check if the battery voltage and manufacturer are the same first...

 

 

You'll have to find out what the "rules" are for active electronics. I know nothing about them and, chances are, 500k pots and 22pF capacitors won't be correct.

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Thanks for all the info! It's pretty neat actually. Those two guitars are the only ones I have with the same pups and they are very different. The Steinberger Synapse is unique with mahogany and a phenolic (some kind of resin or plastic) fingerboard and graphite truss rod. I play it a lot as most of my "woodshedding" is done on the road thru a Boss Micro BR. Sometimes it's a little too dark/flat/ or just one dimensional sound wise. But plugged in to my Mesa and played loud with distortion it really livens up, pretty much as another post described. Youses guys are pretty smart!

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