Mending the Mud-bucker

Is your neck humbucker dull and muddy? 

Have you tried brand after brand, model after model of replacement pickups only to find that, no matter what, you can't seem to get the clarity and articulation you need and deserve? Are you on a budget, and you just can't afford to replace those lifeless stock pickups?

Well, you're in luck. Before you drop another $80-$150 on a new pickup, try this simple, 5-minute mod. I just did it on two of my guitars and I couldn't be happier with the results. All you need is a screwdriver and a soldering iron to rid yourself of this muddy menace.

First, let's talk about how this mod works. Your volume and tone pots act together as a sort of low-pass filter, which bleeds some of the high frequencies produced by the pickups to the ground wires. Without this filter in place, the pickups may (depending on their particular specs) be too bright or shrill sounding for practical use. This is especially true for the bridge position.

Most guitars with humbucking pickups use two 500k pots wired together, which produces 250k of resistance. Basically, the lower the pot resistance, the more highs are sent to ground, and the warmer the tone. Many humbuckers are designed with this in mind, but may still lose too much high end in the neck position.

Since the bridge position typically benefits from 250k of resistance, and the neck position sometimes suffers, this simple mod will remove the tone pot resistance from the neck position, brightening it up a bit while leaving the bridge and middle positions unaffected.

The result is that your neck humbucker will have more high frequency content, be more articulate, have a slightly higher output (fantastic if you use the neck position primarily for leads), and still retain the warm, fat, glassy character it was designed for.

Now that I've sufficiently bored you, let's do the thing.

This example is for a guitar with 2 humbuckers, 1 volume, 1 tone, and a 3-way selector.

Here is a simplified diagram of the components and wires you'll be dealing with.

First, identify the wire connecting the tone pot to the volume pot. I've made it red here.

Heat up your soldering iron and disconnect the wire from the volume pot only.

Now, connect the free end of the wire to the bridge pole of the selector switch. Solder in place.

That's it.

If you've done it correctly, your tone pot will operate as normal in both bridge and middle positions, but will be disconnected in the neck position.

In a guitar with independent volume and tone pots for each pickup (Les Paul, SG, etc), simply disconnect the wire leading from the tone pot to the volume pot for the neck pickup.

Your neck position will now be a little brighter and louder, so you may want make some minor height adjustments, especially on the treble side.

The best part is, if you don't like it, it's incredibly easy to undo.