Certain Pickups Overloading Fuzz

Ginsly

Ginsly

Well-known member
I have a strange situation where in certain fuzz circuits, my single coil guitars are kinda overloading the input more than those with humbuckers. The opposite is usually true for me, and I drastically lowered the pickups on one of the humbucker-equipped guitars years ago and it helped a lot. The other one must have low/medium output humbuckers because the pickup height is pretty "normal".

I lowered the Strat pickups to see if the same thing would happen, but it didn't help much. Haven't messed with the cheapo tele yet, which is also kinda turning to mush through certain fuzzes. I'm using the Middle/Bridge position on the Strat and Middle position on the tele. The buzz is ungodly in any of the other positions.

What do you like to do in this situation? Other than fiddling with the pickup height I breadboarded some of these things:

- series resistor at input. Tried 1K-100K. The higher value helped a bit, but totally zapped the fuzz. Tried this as a "pre-gain" pot too, but just a rheostat - didn't connect the pot to ground (does that matter..? I've seen differing opinions).

- lowered input cap. I expected this to help more, but it mostly just made the fuzz tinnier.

I'm not terribly surprised that the pre-gain resistance didn't help much, as just turning my strat's volume knob down a bit didn't really sound great either.

What else should I try? Seems like this is a pretty standard issue people have when switching between guitars, but I'm not sure how best to deal with it when creating a circuit layout.
 
I'm interested in this too. I've built a few Dumble style tube amps. While studying them I found out he often would tune an amp to a specific type of pickup, i.e. single coil or humbucker, and often the amp would not sound very good with the other type. I wonder if this might hold true with some of the pedals we build?
 
JohnnyCreepy said:
AMZ Pickup simulator building time? Could be inside build or separate box.

Are those cheap pickups high gain ceramic ones?
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Yeah I was just made aware of that- will check it out!

Oddly enough, the one with cheap ceramic humbuckers tends to overload pedals the least- lowering them drastically gave me a good balance. Doing the same on a ‘93 Mexican Strat didn’t improve things as much, although I’m not sure what kind of pickups they used at that time.
 
Static or buzz? Are single coils up picking RF or other noise from the enviroment what fuzz is amplifying?

Don’t know if this works for pedal circuits or for your particular problem, but excessive noise disappeared on my tube amp after adding small capacitor leading from isolated inputs gnd side to the chassis. Cured RF and other enviromental noise (f.ex. from fluorecent light) completely from my amp. Easy thing to do if you’ve isolated jacks.
 
JohnnyCreepy said:
Static or buzz? Are single coils up picking RF or other noise from the enviroment what fuzz is amplifying?

Don’t know if this works for pedal circuits or for your particular problem, but excessive noise disappeared on my tube amp after adding small capacitor leading from isolated inputs gnd side to the chassis. Cured RF and other enviromental noise (f.ex. from fluorecent light) completely from my amp. Easy thing to do if you’ve isolated jacks.
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Oh no, it’s not a noise problem- the guitar signal itself is kinda overloading the circuit and taking away some of the dynamics that are preserved when using humbuckers- usually it’s the opposite!

Tried a pre-gain pot, lowered the pickups, and lowered the input cap- not the greatest results. I really thought the added input resistance would be the ticket, but didn’t really sound great…
 
Well then it’s out of my skills as you’re dealing with advanced sorcery in circuit & transistor input impedance, pickup voodoo with henries, turns and freq response etc.

How about buffering the input. :D I read somewhere here that one humongous monastery guy is doing that…

If you have tiny audio transformers or old pickups to salvage, the pickup simulator is an quick try.

Edit. oh, and I might have noticed couple times when splitting humbuckers for SC mode resulted in more gain, but cannot recall what pedal did it nor understand the phenomenom.
 
Maybe impedance related
I'm assuming all these guitars are passive and you are running the guitars in straight to the fuzz, no buffers in-between.
 
jwin615 said:
Maybe impedance related
I'm assuming all these guitars are passive and you are running the guitars in straight to the fuzz, no buffers in-between.
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Yep they’re all passive, straight into the circuit. So, so strange that humbuckers have the edge here- although the single-coils are used in “humbucking” positions as well.

I’m wondering how to deal with this if it is indeed impedance related? That AMZ pickup sim maybe?
 
What kind of fuzz are we talking about?

The Sandspur has a 50k trimpot in series with the input cap. You could mount an internal trim pot between the board input and the input cap like that. That ones wired as a voltage divider, but you could try it as a variable resistor instead kind of like the input resistor of a Big Muff.
 
cdwillis said:
What kind of fuzz are we talking about?

The Sandspur has a 50k trimpot in series with the input cap. You could mount an internal trim pot between the board input and the input cap like that. That ones wired as a voltage divider, but you could try it as a variable resistor instead kind of like the input resistor of a Big Muff.
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A Fuzzrite of sorts… I did indeed try the pre-gain resistance like you’re talking about, but it didn’t really do the trick. Sounded thinner for sure, but not in a good way.
 
Ginsly said:
Yep they’re all passive, straight into the circuit. So, so strange that humbuckers have the edge here- although the single-coils are used in “humbucking” positions as well.
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Wait, so it's not single coils alone, it's more like a strat position 2 or 4, so two humbucking single coils?
 
What amp are you using and how are you setting it? Have you tried different amps just to see if that could be the reason?

In my experience amps with lower headroom, or if you set your amp to the edge of breakup, will change the character of a fuzz. So much so that what you are hearing is the fuzz saturating the amp and once you are saturating the amp you lose the dynamics. Hitting an edge of breakup amp is super cool with some fuzzes and is how a lot of people use a Fuzz Face. But some fuzz pedals I think sound better through a clean amp.

Try turning the fuzz output volume down so you are not hitting the front end so hard and/or try turning your amps input volume down to make it more clean.
 
Fama said:
Wait, so it's not single coils alone, it's more like a strat position 2 or 4, so two humbucking single coils?
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It happens on all single coil positions, but single-pickup settings (1, 3, 5 or 1 and 3 on the tele) are way too buzzy for fuzz, no matter the circuit. Eventually I’ll look into quieter pickups or some kinda modifications! Early 90’s Mexican Strat and a knockaround Squier tele. My better guitars have humbuckers. :)

Nostradoomus said:
are you sure the circuit is correct?
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Good point! It’s not a standard Fuzzrite, and I’m kinda piecing it together with some detective work. The input section is different, and that may be causing some issues. Still a work in progress, but it sounds very, very close to what I was expecting and should be 99% correct. Single coils don’t necessarily sound bad, they just lose some nuance and sound more compressed at the same full-on Depth setting that works well for humbuckers. Not a huge issue at all, but I’m asking about it for future reference as well as wanting to tweak this one a bit if I can.

Ralfg said:
What amp are you using and how are you setting it? Have you tried different amps just to see if that could be the reason?

In my experience amps with lower headroom, or if you set your amp to the edge of breakup, will change the character of a fuzz. So much so that what you are hearing is the fuzz saturating the amp and once you are saturating the amp you lose the dynamics. Hitting an edge of breakup amp is super cool with some fuzzes and is how a lot of people use a Fuzz Face. But some fuzz pedals I think sound better through a clean amp.

Try turning the fuzz output volume down so you are not hitting the front end so hard and/or try turning your amps input volume down to make it more clean.
Click to expand...
Also great points. Mostly a little Boss Katana set very clean, and I do pay attention to the Gain/Vol balance as well as EQ. Sometimes I’ll record sample clips directly into a preamp/basic cab sim that leads to my interface - also set clean with lots of headroom. Must be either hotter single coils than I realized or an impedance issue like @jwin615 mentioned. It’s good to keep your point in mind, though- I’m mostly using “bedroom” amps at bedroom levels, after all.

Turning the fuzz output down doesn’t help much, so I think it’s happening more in the circuit than between the pedal and amp. That being said, turning the Depth/Fuzz control down does indeed help, as expected. I can easily find settings here that work quite well with single coils, but I’m still trying to see what people like to do in this situation when planning a circuit.

That AMZ pickup sim may be a bit of overkill though! Ha… It involves a transformer (which I believe I have) and added pots, looks like. Gotta poke around, maybe there are different variations.
 
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