Ah, I’d forgotten (and was too lazy to try to find it in this forty page (!) thread.
Hmm, that makes the difference between the XV440 and XV585 neck widths only 1/32", or 0.03125 inches. Color me surprised that those necks widths might feel different from each other.
FWIW, my Tele’s neck width is also 1 11/16" at the nut, so based on that I’m not surprised that the XV440 feels similar.
I’ll look check into the links, thanks. I hope there’s something I can do about the hum, it’s pretty annoying.
That’s the width at the neck. It’s also a skinnier profile. But yes, they do feel different.
And yes, it is. I don’t play the P90 much. Try rolling off tone a bit, maybe. Wordman? He’p! I’ll research in to what Dave Hunter has to say, either his general guitar book or his pickup book should cover it. My Strat book wouldn’t cover much on it, but I think I picked up a Guitar Repair (General) handbook somewhere to get free shipping on Amazon.
I’ll take your word for it. Heck, I’ve got enough experience with necks to know that they can feel unexpectedly different – I can tell when I pick up a given guitar if I like the neck, but I often don’t know why I like that neck.
And thanks for trying to help with the hum, E-Sabs. I’ll probably start with re-soldering everything in the control well using good wires and components. Some of those solder joints look pretty suspect, and there’s a couple of hair-thin wires in places. Of course I’ll also try to add shielding to the whole cavity. But first I’ll need to make a wiring diagram, and maybe a parts list if I want to replace the caps or pots (I doubt I’d replace the pots, but who knows). Should be fun.
Here’s an odd thing: there’s only one wire hooked up to the input jack. The ground coming from the amp appears to be unused. I didn’t expect that. Is that common practice to isolate ground loops (if that’s the term), or shoddy wiring design?
Awesome work, thanks! I’ll use that as a reference when I re-do the control cavity. It’ll be interesting to see how my setup differs, if it does. If the pots are different value, I assume I will need a different cap value, not sure. Hell, I guess the pickup ohm-age would need to be factored as well. I’m so hazy on this stuff.
You’re doing a great job, **E-Sabs **- no worries. That Gear Page link makes sense - that would be where I would go to check things out.
squeegee - sounds like you got a great “test guitar” - you can have all the P-90 fun you want with no guilt, and tweak with the circuitry and break stuff if you need to and no one will care. That’s when some of the best learning happens.
P-90’s are noisy as shit - no two ways about it and that is why Gibson was so jazzed when they intro’d the Humbucker in '57.
Checking solders and adding shielding is rarely anything other than a good idea, so you should go for it.
if you find that the tonality of the hum changes, or you hear scraping sounds when you dial the knobs, you may have lower quality components. Swapping in an RS Guitarworks set of pots, caps, resistors, etc. could help out and will certainly have the potential to address the muddiness you are discussing.
If that doesn’t help enough, you can always go on line, find a pair of used Duncan P-90’s on eBay for cheap and play around. Even if you buy both an RS kit and new / used Duncans, you can still keep your experiment below $200.
I can’t stress enough how sensitive good p-90’s can be in terms of tone and muddiness. Since the hum is so freaking loud, trying hitting a chord and allow it to sustain, then dial up and down the Tone control - do you hear a “wah pedal like” effect as you do? I would expect that with all of that hum, it would stand out - a great way to learn how to listen for it. If so, see if there are any sweet spots in that range - with some of my P-90 guitars, there is a subtle-but-big difference - the difference between 8 and 8 1/4 on my '57 LP Special is clear and obvious when I am playing; and when I am NOT playing and dialing up and down the tone control, I hear a definite spot right at that point where the wah sound takes on a different character. I can’t describe it any better, but if you listen for it, it may / should (?) be there.
I use a Noise Suppressor/gate with my P-90 / Fuzzbox/Tweed set up - a Boss NS-2. I really like how it keeps the noise down when I am not playing and I also feel like it tightens up the lows a bit since it cuts of the buzz when the signal passes below the Gating threshold.
It sounds silly, but get in the habit of automatically rolling off the volume when you are done with a song. THat’s what I do live when I have a P-90 guitar - play through the big crescendo with the band at the end of the song and then reach down and spin off the Volume. Very Old School. But since I am always looking to train myself to listen to my tone and tweak the knobs BB King style to dial in my P-90 tone, this is just another habit that reinforces that…
Minor side-track: can anyone recommend music recording software on a Mac… I have GarageBand, so anything more advanced for looping and recording (or should I stick with GarageBand?)… I am on the novice-end with respect to recording and this would be purely for my own enjoyment, so it would have to be below ProTools in scope…
WordMan: The operative question is, (and again, I have the same P90 in my neck on the 585), are they supposed to have that nigh-constant hum past, uhm, about 7 on Tone? (from memory, because ever since the Telemaster, it’s been in its case)
It’s just there. Not cycling because of being near a RF hotspot, it’s just there and proud of itself.
I was thinking bout suggesting a noise suppressor, myself, but hey, it’s money.
As far as the pots and caps, GFS stuff is quality. The assembly may not be, but the gear itself is pretty good. You can look at the stuff they sell, it’s what’s in the guitar.
(And remember, my 585 is semi-hollow. Means that shielding it would be… interesting, to say the least.)
If you want to ride the tiger, you gotta expect that claws are part of the bargain.
(good lord, that is just the cheesiest statement ever)
Yes, the hum is just…there. Imagine a nice little Fender single-coil on steroids; that’s a P-90. You get tone for days, but pay a price. Again, the whole world of humbucking pickups emerged from this aspect of their performance, so it is not surprising that it stands out to our ears…
Again, that Boss NS-2 does a great job for me, as does my old school knob tweaking. But I am a tone weenie - for your average “hey I just want to play” guitar player, P-90’s, to be clear, are higher-maintenance than most would choose to deal with…
So, basically, Squeegee’s guitar is ‘performing as expected’, but can possibly improve itself with a little hand-TLC.
…
Yeah, that’s about what I’d expect from a Guitarfetish product. Cheap, and at least as good as something three times the price, but one hundred percent the kind of thing you can disassemble to make work better.
Dude, you’re making me look bad; I tried to just skate over that issue
The short answer is: I am not sure. When I have wired up my two homebrew Tele’s, I used a combination of:
[ul]
[li]The existing circuit that was there[/li][li]The circuit I found on the Seymour Duncan website that corresponded to the pickups I have[/li][li]The schematics I found on Fender’s website for the pickup configuration I was trying to mimic[/li][li]Any tips I found online from hot-rodders who focus on tone or quietness performance I was wanting to try[/li][/ul]
In other words: I remember soldering stuff to the input jack, shielding stuff, leaving a wire exposed and trapped between the Tele bridge and the body of the guitar and a few other ground-related things, but couldn’t tell you what I did exactly - or what exactly they do. I soldered, put everything together and it worked reasonably quietly. I didn’t really question much beyond that.
I think I just get kinda lucky with my wiring work. I mean, even a blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then If you go back to my build thread, there was an initial period where I knew I was getting the wrong tone but had to retrace my steps to figure out what I had done wrong (which was to blend a couple of schematics together incorrectly…)
You’re reading my mind, it should be a fun tinkering-guitar, with little risk if I screw it up.
I think the components are probably fine, it’s the wiring job. I was fiddling around in the control cavity with the guitar plugged in, and the signal cut out 90% when I pulled a certain wire (!). So it looks like there’s a soldering job in my future no matter what.
Also, after further scrutiny, I can declare the noise to be much like the single coils I’ve owned in the past – contrary to my previous description, the noise is not continuous, it does vary (or even goes away) depending on the location I play it. My previous mistake was not getting far enough away from my computers (there’s three in front of me) to get a good feel for the RF qualities. If I back like 10 feet away from my towers and move the guitar around, the noise becomes much more predictable and much less annoying. So that’s good (although vexing, as I’ve just bought an SM57 and a mic mount for my combo, and recording that involves either being right in front of a computer or running back and forth to/from one).
Here’s something else I hadn’t noticed before: the pickups appear to be wired out of phase with each other. When I play in the middle position, the hum is almost entirely gone. Which is cool, as I rather like the guitar’s tone when I blend the pickups.
Huh. I just did as you said, and the tone ramp seems continuous to me until down to about 3, at which point the treble drops off a cliff and from 1-3 it doesn’t change more than a little. When I play normally, I do dial the treble back to 7-ish, perhaps a little more on the bridge pickup, and back off the volume to a similar range.
Re P-90 noise: as an experiment, would it be worth it to a) unsolder one of the pickups from the controls and b) solder that directly to the jack (or to a free-standing jack, thoroughly grounded) and check out the noise profile? It seems like if it still hums, then it’s the pickups. And if it doesn’t hum as much, it’s the wiring/shielding.
About the same, but it’s quite usable as-is. I just need to play it for a bit, tune again, and then I’m done and the tuning is pretty stable. Maybe tweak the G or B later on, maybe not.
It does make quite a bit of sense, given the P-90 noise profile. When I noticed the phase, my immediate reaction was “well of course they’re out of phase! It’s a freaking neolithic humbucker!”
Yeah, I wasn’t expecting that either, or at least not as much noise as I heard. Though to be fair, I do have a shitload of gear on/around my desk and should have taken that into account.
If you go back to my build thread, there was an initial period where I knew I was getting the wrong tone but had to retrace my steps to figure out what I had done wrong (which was to blend a couple of schematics together incorrectly…)