Weird ears

[Gswitz]

I put daddario flat wound strings on my guitar... not my normal strings. 

I was demoing the tone knob to a friend, and it didn't work. I couldn't hear it. Neither could she. 

I disassembled the guitar. The tone knob works fine. 

New regular strings. We both hear the variance when adjusting the tone. 

Isn't this odd?

[reginaldStjohn]

Flat wound strings don't create as much high end as round wound. Could be that the tone knob was not removing much high frequencies since they were not there?

 

Edited February 13 by reginaldStjohn

[Gswitz]

The weird thing is the bridge pickup had noticeable changes to the tone.  The neck did not. 

Edited February 13 by Gswitz

[mettelus]

Depending on the caps used, the range of the tone knob might not have the same effect for sure. The bridge pickup specifically is located closer to the bridge node, so there is a higher concentration of harmonics (which will give more high end than the strings will see at the neck).

[Gswitz]

Ok. Really it had me doubting myself. Again, imagine me disassembling the guitar!

The test i did ultimately could have been done with the guitar assembled. Tap the pickup with a screwdriver while turning the knob.

I've been using those tone knobs for years. It was interesting to note that the back one appeared to be a stack of two. 

Looked like this...

https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/0990847000--fender-dual-500k-250k-split-shaft-potentiometer

My guitar came with gold lace sensor pickups. I bought it new in 1995.

Edited February 14 by Gswitz

[bitflipper]

I love a mystery, especially when something behaves in what seems to be an inexplicable manner at first glance.

Long ago I had a pair of PA column speakers that suddenly had really poor bass response. I took them apart, tested each of the 8 speakers separately, verified they were wired correctly. Curiously, if I ran just one of the cabinets - either one - the bass was fine. But when connected in parallel, the bass disappeared. I'm sure anyone reading this knows exactly what had gone wrong. In my defense, I was 19 and didn't know half of what I thought I knew at the time. Turned out, one of my home-made speaker cables had one end wired in reverse. 

In Geoff's case, confounding though it is, the answer is simple in retrospect. The passive tone control on most guitars is a simple RC low-pass filter. The fact is that the harmonic content in a plucked electric guitar string  is quite subtle. Plug your guitar into an oscilloscope sometime, you'll see that it's essentially a poorly-formed sine wave. And what happens when you apply a filter to a sine wave? One of two things: either it does nothing, or it acts like a volume control, depending on whether the signal frequency falls within the attenuated range of the filter.

The effect of the filter is more obvious on the bridge pickup simply because there's more harmonic content in the signal. reginaldStjohn's comment about flat-wound strings being mellower was news to me, but makes sense. I've never heard flat-wound strings on a 6-string, but am familiar with the tonal difference on a bass.

[craigb]

Before I bought the Bible:

I had two Bose subwoofer / satellite setups that, properly set up has one subwoofer in each of two corners that are diagonal from each other.  Because of a hyper neighbor (and the fact that I was setting up my room above the garage as a bit of a club with loud music and lighting), I put both subwoofers in the corner farthest away from his house.  During testing, there was very little bass, but he can over banging on the door and saying everything in his kitchen was vibrating and bouncing!

Turns out, the subwoofers were so close together that the sound waves were combining to become one huge wave that was too large to be experienced in my room, but were being felt by the neighbor I was trying not to annoy!  🤣

[Gswitz]

Weird is how much I doubted myself. Had i not been using that tone knob for 30 years? 

Also odd I didn't go up the neck to test better. 

I watched some YouTube video about loaded pick guards (I didn't know they are a thing).

I didn't test again in the morning. I just got the screwdriver and opened it up. 

I didn't take any pictures when it was open. I did clean it up. After 30 years, there was a surprising amount stuff under there. 

I basically just noticed the wiring looked solid and then googled for the screwdriver pot test. I demonstrated it works fine and screwed it back together. 

I guess for me the fact that I ran so very fast in the wrong direction is the shocker.

No harm was done, thank goodness. 

Edited Saturday at 12:04 AM by Gswitz

[57Gregy]

7 hours ago, bitflipper said:

I've never heard flat-wound strings on a 6-string

When I was 14, living in Frankfurt, the only place close by to buy strings was a little cubby hole of a shop near the PX.
The only brand and type of strings they carried were Black Diamond flat wounds.
I didn't know there were other kinds of string until I was stateside a few years later.

[Gswitz]

I'm not sure my strings were flat wounds... they didn't seem to be wound at all. They were more like 6 unwound strings - super smooth -  no finger whistle as you moved your hands.. They are under so much pressure they lifted the trem tail a little.  Bent the neck. They were supposed to be for jazz, and I was doing Jazz lessons from Dave Stryker online through artist works. I even spent a week with him in the north carolina mountains at a sort of band camp. Great guy. He is a person i found easy to like. Anyway, I got a three pack and disliked the strings so much I took them off and forgot about them. Recently, I tried another set and that caused this chain of events. So really, it was Dave's fault. 

Edited Sunday at 03:16 AM by Gswitz

[Starship Krupa]

On 2/13/2025 at 1:36 PM, Gswitz said:

The weird thing is the bridge pickup had noticeable changes to the tone.  The neck did not.

I guess you've already figured out: the tone control is a lowpass filter. You're only going to notice its effect when there's enough high frequency information to "miss."

Round wound strings are WAY brighter than flat wounds, and what's coming from that bridge pickup also has more high-end frequency content.