Tidy hacking is the idea that you can quickly make a space appear tidy. In the ideal case, tidy hacking is equivalent to tidying up efficiently. However, usually you take shortcuts that make the space appear more organized at first glance but that ultimately cause more hidden disorganization. Tidy hacking is about hiding the true state of your home's cleanliness from your guests. This can sometimes feel uncomfortable or even dishonest, but an alternative view is that you're being respectful by efficiently making the space welcoming to your guests. As we start hosting after the long break imposed by the pandemic, tidy hacking may come in useful.
Suppose a friend is coming over and you only have 10 minutes notice. You'll be frantically trying to clean up to make your home appear tidy and welcoming. Of course, you cannot clean up your whole home properly in just 10 minutes (because let's face it, most of us don't have magazine picture-perfect houses). How do you prioritize which tasks to do before your friend arrives and which tasks to leave undone? Should you clear the clutter off of the couch or polish the silverware? Obviously, you should clear the clutter off of the couch. But usually it's not so clear.
Here's our priority list for tidy hacking:
Hide clutter in spaces that won't be seen by your guests, like closets, bedrooms or drawers.
Do a quick vacuum of the floors. We find vacuuming to a have a good visual return on a small time investment.
Put dishes off the bench and into the sink (this makes the kitchen appear more clear).
Close doors to messy rooms.
Wipe down the dining room table.
Check the bathroom for obvious messes, focus on the sink and toilet. Hide the shower with the curtain. You can't be sure you can keep the guests out of your bathroom!
Tidy hacking isn't always the right approach. For example, if you clean up your bedroom by putting all your papers and toys under the bed, then you've solved the problem in the short term, but you haven't effectively increased the usability of your space for yourself. More generally, tidy hacking only works for a little while, if you only tidy hack, then eventually the mess will catch up. Sometimes deep cleaning and organizing are necessary.
Hopefully, you can keep your house in a state of generally good organization and cleanliness. If that's the case (or if you've recently been feature in a home living magazine!), then tidy hacking may not be necessary or appealing since you're able to welcome guests into a genuinely tidy house. On the other hand, our lives are sometimes in a season where extra energy to clean up regularly is not available -- but guests may still come at short notice. For example, if you have recently welcomed a newborn baby into your family, then cleaning your house to the same standard that you have previous been accustomed to may no longer be feasible.
The goal is to be welcoming and hospitable in your home. If tidy hacking helps you be hospitable by honoring your guests with a more presentable home given the limits of your time, then tidy hacking may be for you.
Over the last few couple of years, I have replaced all my electric guitar pickups with Fishman Fluence models http://fishman.com/products/series/fluence/. Fluence pickups are relatively low noise and have great tone but the wiring diagrams on Fishman’s website sometimes leave out cool possibilities. In this blog post, I’ll detail the pickup combinations and custom wiring that I’ve created for each of my instruments and then I’ll go over some of theory of why having low noise pickups is great. I made up some of these pickup wiring combinations myself and this blog post is my way of seeding the internet with these possibilities.
I’m on a multi-decade quest to eliminate electric guitar hum. Gates are great, but the noise comes through when notes sound. To reduce noise, I designed my own preamplifiers (badly), applied shielding (without much effect), got an Electroharmonix Hum Debugger and mostly just playing with humbucker pickups. (The Hum Debugger is a really interesting concept, but I found that it messed with the guitar tone in some noticeable ways.) In hindsight, I really should have bought some active EMG pickups since those are also reputed to be low noise. However, the Fluence pickups were the first aftermarket pickups that I got. I was a little bit disappointed with the noise performance of most of the Fluence pickup voices because I was hoping for a silence that would match the grave. But they are lower noise, and you can set the threshold on your gate much lower. I was really blown away by the sound quality and versatility for the Fluence pickups. Some of that versatility is explained in Fishman’s documentation, but most Fluence pickup configurations have the possibility of offering the guitarist extra, undocumented configurations. I will explain some of those here.
The only other non-factory Fluence wiring diagram that I have found in a link in the description of this YouTube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYb2791IG1U by Gerry Trevino.
Guitars and wiring diagrams
I’ll go over the five pickup combinations:
Humbucker-single-humbucker (HSH) config in my Jackson Performer
Double humbucker (HH) config in my Gibson Les Paul
Triple single coil (SSS) config in my DIY Strat
Two soapbar pickups in my ESP bass
Humbucker & single coil (HS) config in my DIY Strat
Jackson Performer HSH
My first electric guitar was a made-in-Japan Jackson Performer, chosen because it was blue and it had a whammy bar.
(Above photo shot in 2019 with Fluence pickups installed)
(Above photo was taken in 2012 with a more primitive camera, after modifications including a failed kitchen aluminum foil-as-shielding experiment. You can see some around the middle pickup.)
Along with the finish and the Floyd Rose (which ended up being more trouble than it was worth!), I got two humbuckers, one in the bridge position and one in the neck and a single coil pickup sandwiched between. One of my childhood friends said “wow it’s got 5 pickups.” I corrected him that it actually only had 3. You could select between different combinations of them with a 5 way switch. I’m not actually sure how the original wiring went. Probably it had coil taps in positions 2 & 4. I modified it many times over the years. The pickup sound was ok, at least for the bridge humbucker. I mostly played that pickup and usually with grinding distortion from some digital emulation or other of the Mesa Boogie Dual Rectifier, with a noise gate set appropriately. I recorded from the middle single coil pickup very rarely. I remember recording one song where I would start the count in, and then awkwardly hold the guitar at the angle that minimized the hum while I recorded a take.
Fast forward to when I found myself in a road show talk / lengthy in-person commercial with the Master Magician, Mr. Fishman himself, where he explains his new noiseless single coil strat pickups. Some time later I bought a lone single coil pickup https://www.fishman.com/products/series/fluence/fluence-single-width-pickups-for-hss-hsh-hs/. I hack it into my Jackson performer and took the dubious step of combining an active single coil pickup with two passive humbuckers. If you’ve read the internet, then you know for sure that combining active and passive pickups will immediately cause a tone singularity and your instrument will probably catch fire, disturbing all squirrels in a 10 kilometer radius. And that’s exactly what happened. …Just kidding, it worked totally fine. Except that the Fluence single coil really outshined the cheapo stock Jackson humbuckers. The Fluence single coil pickup had almost no hum at all, usually none, but it did have preamp hiss. Grrr. These aren’t quite the droids we’re looking for; this wasn’t the Holy Grail noise-free guitar experience that I sought.
But the tone was great and there was definitely less noise over all, so in order to atone for my unforgivable sin of combining passive and active pickups, I got a Killswitch Engage signature Fluence set https://www.fishman.com/products/series/fluence/killswitch-engage-signature-pickup-set/. At the time I thought that the Modern set https://www.fishman.com/products/series/fluence/fluence-modern-humbucker-pickup wouldn’t let you have a single coil tone, but that’s not quite right; they let you do coil tapping, which is similar. Anyway, for me it was a hard choice between the Killswitch Engage (KSE) set and the Tosin Abasi set. I didn’t get the pickups because I’m a huge Killswitch Engage fan, and I actually listened to more of their music as a result of buying their signature pickup. (They are a totally killer band and they rock so majorly hard that it would put tears to my eyes if I ever wished to be able to play as well as them.) Fishman offers a wiring diagrams for the KSE humbucker set on its own, and also for a humbucker-single-humbucker (HSH) configuration like on my Jackson guitar. Let’s call those diagrams … a good start. Now only god and Fishman’s legal team know why the they don’t make a solderless system like EMG so that everyone with ten fingers and a six string can install Fluence pickups. But anyway, the wiring diagrams are meant to be easy enough if you’re know which is the hot end of a soldering iron. We’re gonna go significantly beyond that. But you’re gonna have to suffer more basic diagram quality in the style of standard electronics schematics.
Here’s the voicing options that you get with a KSE HSH Fluence configuration. Actually it’s the same if you swap out the KSE set with a Tosin Abasi set, or a Classic set. You can even swap in a Modern set with some minor wiring changes.
This is an awesomely versatile pick up configuration. The KSE bridge humbucker has a ceramic magnet and it sounds awesomely tight. Voice 1 has a low end cut that sounds absolutely amazing when it’s driving a recent digital emulation of the Mesa Boogie Dual Rectifier with the gain cranked. This awesome sound can be emulated with any other pickup and an EQ pedal doing a massive bass cut first up in your chain. Actually, my exploration of Fishman pickups has really made me appreciate just how much difference you can make just by EQing the raw guitar signal. I wonder if the different voice selections are nothing more than different EQ settings. The KSE ceramic voice 2 is a bit more mellow than voice 1. Voice 2 has a bit less high end and quite a bit more bass, but it actually is the Holy Grail of low noise pickups. You can turn the gain up to 11, plug in the KSE ceramic humbuckers, turn off your gate and it’s quiet until you hit the strings. Wow. If only they were all like this. Voice 1 for the neck has a wonderful deep tone, that’s chimey in voice 1 and darker in voice 2. I really like voice 1 of the neck KSE pickup. The KSE neck pickup has an alnico but it is not Christ’s Cup in the quest for silence — it hums a little bit — bummer. The middle pickup + coil tap options are also really interesting. They’ve got even more hum than the KSE alnico pickup, but they’ve got a wonderful tone which is very much single coil, but retains aspects of the humbucker’s character. I especially like the neck coil tap + middle. The south coil of the neck pickup is the closest coil to the neck, so it’s got some of the deep, magical chime of the strat neck single coil pickup.
With the stock pickups, I hardly ever used the volume or tone controls. There are a few problems with passive pickups and the traditional guitar control setup. Part of the problem is that the cable connected to the guitar has some capacitance. So if you turn down the volume control, then there’s a low pass filter happening. To combat that you can add a treble bleed capacitor. I should have added a treble bleed to my guitars before, but I never did for some reason. With active pickups, the impedance of your source is much less, so you can have a small valued volume potentiometer and turning down the volume gets you quieter without losing the high frequencies as much. This is great because it frees up your volume control to be actually useful for setting the gain on your amp. Because Fluence pickups have quite a bit more brightness and there’s no high frequency loss at lower volume knob settings, I found that the tone control suddenly becomes much more useful. The tone control is also much less aggressive, maybe because it’s more of a 1 pole filter (just the tone capacitor) rather than a 2 pole filter with a steeper rolloff (the inductance of the pickup plus the tone capacitor). This must be what the Fishman marketing calls “frustrating inductance issues.”
While the KSE HSH pickup combination is highly versatile with the Fishman recommended wiring, there are some cool tones that these pickups can produce that you can’t get at. For example, let’s say I want to access voice 3 of the humbuckers? Easy, add a second push-pull pot to toggle the voice 3 wire for both humbuckers. But I tried this and found that voice 3 has lots of hum — unless you run both the bridge & neck pickups at once.
Why oh why is the individual single coil pickup noise free, but the single coil mode of the humbuckers so noisy? Isn’t there a clever set of paths on those razor thin printed circuit board layers that get me everything I want in terms of great tone and low noise, for both humbucker sounds and single coil sounds? Epiphone/Fishman marketing claim that the goal of a noise free single coil tone alongside humbuckering voices has been achieved in Fluence pickups made specifically for the Epiphone Prophecy series of guitars. Hopefully, a similar kind of aftermarket pickup will be sold by Fishman soon.
With both KSE humbuckers in voice 3, you get the inner coils, which together reduce noise similar to a humbucker but with a more single coil kind of sound. I’m guessing that the Fluence designs have better hum elimination than wound pickups because the Fluence pickups can have exactly the same number of turns and the same magnetic circuit geometries (in principle & if they want, anyway). So let’s say that bridge + neck both in voice 3 is a worthwhile combo. (There’s another problem that shows up if you select voice 3 on the neck pickup, but then choose the neck coil tap + middle pickup where the output goes almost completely silent. Maybe the south coil of the neck pickup gets mostly grounded to produce voice 3.) What about the bridge and the neck at once, but humbucking in voice 1 or 2? All that’s required to get these other combinations is the willingness to take risks without worrying about a warrantee, some electronics knowledge, and some experimentation based on intelligent guessing at how the Fluence pickups work.
Here’s a wiring diagram with two push-pull pots that lets you realize those extra combinations.
Switch position
Volume pot down, tone pot down
Volume pot down, tone pot up
Volume pot up, tone pot down
Volume pot up, tone pot up
1
Bridge humbucker voice 1
Bridge humbucker voice 2
Bridge + neck voice 1
Bridge + neck voice 2
2
Bridge Coil Tapped & Middle
3
Middle
4
Neck Coil Tapped & Middle
5
Neck humbucker voice 1
Neck humbucker voice 1
Bridge + neck, voice 3
Bridge + neck, voice 3
I’ve now made the volume control be a push-pull. One of the switches is used to connect the outputs of the two humbuckers together. The other switch grounds the voice 3 select lines, but only when you’re in the neck position.
Sound examples on YouTube:
Also, notice that the push-pull switch doesn’t do anything of 3 of the 5 position. Doesn’t it feel like it should? Here’s another config that makes a bit more sense to me, but requires a 3PDT switch which I haven’t found as a push-pull. Actually I think I’ve come to prefer toggles over push-pulls because the push-pull feels like it “should” be down to me, whereas I’m not as bothered by where the toggles are. I think Fishman goes for push-pulls as part of their guiding principle of giving people the normal electric guitar thing, just better. I’m hoping that electric guitar has room to evolve, but the truth is that I’m rapidly becoming an old guy stuck in the past just like a large percentage of guitarists. I haven’t tried this configuration yet, but here’s what you could achieve:
Switch position
Toggle one way
Toggle the other
1
Bridge humbucker voice 1
Bridge humbucker voice 2
2
Bridge + neck voice 1
Bridge + neck voice 2
3
Middle
Bridge + neck, voice 3
4
Neck Coil Tapped & Middle
Bridge Coil Tapped & Middle
5
Neck humbucker voice 1
Neck humbucker voice 1
So at this point, I’ve got this mid-90’s Jackson Performer that my dad bought me when I was a teen and it’s tricked out with several hundred dollars worth of pickup –- it’s mostly pickup in terms of 2nd hand price at this point. It sounds pretty great, but it’s got some mechanical problems, including that terrible Floyd Rose which doesn’t re-center (I later fixed that). I think the next step for this guitar is to replace the neck, the body and the hardware. I mean, like, build a new guitar and use it instead. Probably I’ll keep the guitar in operable condition in some way or another, just because the instrument has sentimental value to me.
Gibson Les Paul HH
My second electric guitar is a 2013 Gibson LPJ, the cheapest made-in-USA Les Paul model. I bought it for myself after completing my PhD and my choise was also based on two criteria: no whammy bar, and humbuckers.
(I later replaced that funny looking chicken head knob somehow. Unfortunately, the stock knob caps don’t fit on the plain head of the rotary switch.)
The stock pickups on that guitar were the 498T "Hot Alnico" Bridge Pickup and the 490R - "Modern Classic" - Neck Pickup. They sound pretty good. But even humbuckers hum and I’m on this lifelong religious quest for low noise. I changed my mind a few times about replacing these pickups, but eventually I decided to put a Fluence Classic set in. Knowing that I wanted versatility because it’s so much fun, I chose to replace one of the tone pots with a 6 way rotary switch to do the voice selection.
Switch position
Bridge voice
Neck voice
1
1 PAF
1 PAF
2
1 PAF
2 Clear, airy chime
3
2 Hot rod
2 Clear, airy chime
4
2 Hot rod
1 PAF
5
3 Single coil (inner coils)
3 Single coil (inner coils)
6
3 Single coil (outer coils)
3 Single coil (outer coils)
Assembling these kinds of guitar circuits is made easier if you have the right parts and you use the right tricks. I soldered a 3 pin header to the coil selector pads so that I could easily unplug and swap the pickups later on. You can get the required 4-pole 6-way rotary switch, for example, here https://www.allparts.com/collections/switches/products/ep-0920-6-position-rotary-switch. If you’ve already used up the nice connectors that came with your Fluence pickups, it can make things easier to get replacements, like, for example, this Jumper Wire - 0.1", 3-pin, 12" from SparkFun https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10373.
The Classic set has hum. It’s a disappointment, but I speculate that having slightly mismatched coils could be required for “that old school sound.” To be clear, there’s a lot less hum than with the stock wound pickups.
The Fluence Classic set does sound different than the stock pickups for a while that was a bit of a sad point for me. The bridge voice 2 “Hot Rod” sounds pretty similar to my old 498T bridge pickup and the neck voice 1 “PAF” has hints of the 490R neck pickup. But there’s a lot more brightness in the Fluence pickups. I could probably get closer to the stock pickup sound by trying out the high frequency tilt option. Maybe I will at some stage, but I love my new high end and I’m already starting to not miss the stock pickup sounds as much. Like I said for the KSE set, the Fluence pickups really redeem the volume and tone controls (ironicly I removed one of my tone controls). It’s really weird, but I previously didn’t really like the fatter neck on my LPJ, but with the Fishman Fluence Classic set, the neck feels nicer. (Of course, this is proof of magic, ghosts, voodoo and that you should believe everything that you read on the internet that’s written by no-name bloggers.) The difference between the inner coils and the outer coils is pretty massive. Like the KSE pickups in voice 3, the Classic set in voice 3 has lots of hum, but with the pickup selector toggle in the middle position, it’s bearable and the tones are amazing. It really breaths new life into the instrument to be able to get single coil tones. Remember that many, many years of my life was spent stuck on that bridge humbucker on my Jackson. I’ve also started to believe that tone woods might make a difference, because I can hear that mahogany midrange cutting through like thick cream. (Yes I’ve really gone off the deep end, I know!)
DIY Strat SSS
My third electric guitar is one I assembled myself. I read the book “The Birth of Loud” and when I finished it, I had an insane urge to own a Fender Stratocaster. I searched my soul, knowing that the whammy bar is not for me. Long story short, I bought a hard tail body from Warmoth and bolted on a Fender made-in-Mexico neck. I had a great, educational time assembling it myself.
Of course, it’s got Fishman Fluence pickups, but in a strange display of capricious brand loyalty, I sanded the Fishman name off of the pickup covers (and left the Fender logos alone). You can still see the signature Fluence stripe bit though. (I’ll have to buy some plain covers, even just for a better color match to the pick guard.) The main modification to the wiring diagram I made was to add a second push pull that connects the bridge and neck pickups together, so that you can get bridge + neck and all 3 pickups. The first push pull gives you voice 1 or 2, like the Fishman recommended wiring. I also let the middle tone control work for the bridge position.
Switch position
Extra push pull down
Extra push pull up
1
Bridge
Bridge + neck (2nd tone control)
2
Bridge + middle
All three (2nd tone control)
3
Middle
Middle
4
Neck + middle
All three (both tone controls)
5
Neck
Bridge + neck (1st tone control)
The wiring diagram is close enough to stock that you can probably figure it out yourself, at least if you’re the kind of person who is able to read my circuit diagrams above.
The Fishman strat set is amazing. I love it. Like the individual single coil pickup, they are pretty much hum free, but they have a bit of preamp hiss. The battery life has been great. For my light playing, I haven’t replaced any 9V batteries yet. Why not have a shorter battery life and have less noise? Or have a much bigger battery pack and get both? Or charge extra for a low noise option? Questions for Fishman engineering & marketing to ponder, I guess.
Sound examples on YouTube:
The only other complaint I would level against the Fluence strat set is that the 2 & 4 "in-between" switch positions don't sound as awesome and phase-y as the single coil + humbucker south coil out combinations in the KSE HSH set.
ESP LTD B-155 Bass (soapbars)
I have an ESP LTD B-155 bass guitar. I got it at university with a medium-small budget at the Rockshop in Christchurch, New Zealand.
The criterion for purchase was 5 strings, for those extra-low sounds. I haven’t played bass as much as I’ve played guitar and it’s only recently that I’ve really been teaching myself sound design for bass. For a while I feel like I was hindered by having fewer and less interesting digital emulations of awesome bass amplifiers. For a lot of the time, I ended up not really liking the tones that I could get, or living with what I could get. I was probably also imagining Fender Jazz bass and Precision bass sounds in records and wondering why I was getting such different sounds. All that said, the stock pickups in my B-155 weren’t amazing. I thought about getting a real 4 string Fender bass (probably one both a Precision bass type pickup and a Jazz bass type pickup), but I ended up keeping the LTD and adding in some of the Fluence bass soapbars when they had been released. The Fluence soapbars were actually a tiny bit too big to fit into the pickup cavities, so I filed down the ends of the Fluence pickup plastic packages until they fit. They don’t really move freely so it’s a mess to adjust the pickup heights. The bass soapbar set comes with heaps of options already so I actually haven’t made any modifications to that wiring diagram at all! The one thing that might be interesting would be to add a switch that lets you choose the outer coils instead of the inner coils for the single coil mode. I used the 2 EQ knobs control wiring and drilled a new hole in my bass to add the voice switch. (Hello humans, I am an engineer here to remind you that the world is infinitely mutable. You can just drill holes in your guitar to add more controls. No problem! Just don’t let the drill slip.)
The sound of the Fluence bass soapbars is great. Voice 1 is full and has lots of highs and midrange. Voice 2 mid cut is my favorite and voice 2 flat is somewhat uninspiring, except with a distorted guitar amplifier front end for djenty doom. The noise level of the humbucking mode is at Holy Grail levels, so that’s fantastic, but the single coil mode buzzes like a chainsaw unless you blend the two pickups equally. Is it a coincidence that both pickups that meet my expectations for minimal noise (KSE bridge/cermaic and the bass soapbars) have ceramic magnets? Maybe that material offers better consistency or a more even magnetic field distribution? If you’re a magnet wizard, help me out here.
The versatility of the 2 EQ knobs option is really amazing. I can dial in a great bass sound, but if you change all the controls on the bass, then the magic can leave completely. From a sound design perspective, I also made the important discovery that the single bass amplifier model in my POD HD 500X, the “Flip Top” emulation of the Ampeg Portaflex is really poorly matched to my tastes. I bought the POD HD bass model pack and I’ve been much happier with the new models. While I really like the classic Fender bass sounds, I have also come to appreciate the djent bass sound that the Darkglass B7K offers. One day, I should get myself a Darkglass B7K, and then maybe a Fender American Ultra Precision Bass https://www.fender.com/products/basses/precision/american-ultra. Probably by that time, Fishman will release J-bass and P-bass pickups and I’ll end up building my own P-bass with Warmoth parts.
DIY Strat HS
While I was slowly working on refretting my Jackson, I took out the pickups and made a two pickup configuration for my Strat. This is a great advantage of the top-route body design: you can make a new pick guard assembly and quickly swap out your pickups. I got the body routed with a humbucker sized hole for the bridge, so no body changes were required.
Here’s the way the pickup selection works with a 5 way super switch and a DPDT toggle, and the wiring diagram.
Switch position
Toggle one way
Toggle the other way
1
Bridge humbucker voice 1
2
Bridge humbucker voice 2
Bridge humbucker voice 3
3
Parallel neck + bridge humbucker voice 1
Parallel neck + bridge humbucker voice 2
4
Bridge coil tapped & neck
5
Neck
One trick here is to solder a connector onto the south coil out pad, to make swapping the pickups easier.
I started with the KSE alnico pickup, but I intend to swap around the pickups each time I change strings. Sometime I should also try putting the KSE set into my Les Paul. You can also get housings that let you put a single coil pickup into a humbucker space, so I could even try out the single coil pickup in the Les Paul. The possibilities are really endless.
Attaching the single coil wires to a connector can be advantageous, although this connector is too big to fit through the wire holes in my top-routed guitars. Some soldering is still required.
This is how the wiring looks like under the pickguard.
Why reduce noise?
Let me explain why I am so focused on reducing noise. Loud and soft is one important aspect of the listener experience — we want to have a great dynamic range. If a guitar produces noise, the we’re corrupting the listening experience. We can use a noise gate to remove the noise, but only when we’re not playing. Actually it’s a bit more complicated than that, because a gate stops all sounds below a certain threshold, regardless of whether or not that sound is noise, signal or a mixture of the two. Using a noise gate sacrifices some of the available dynamic range. The situation looks something like this:
Our pickups produce some peak output voltage when I’m strumming as hard as I can. That’s the line at the top. Ideally, when I don’t play, I should get 0V, which is the electronic audio representation of total silence. However, there’s always some noise floor. When the signal is below the noise floor, then the gate is going to chop off that quiet signal. So I’m not able to play as quietly as I might like. The noise floor and dynamic range situation gets worse when we add some distortion into the mix:
For the price of our wonderful saturation, clipping and ultimately, rock and roll, we lose out on the dynamic range. If you pick as hard as you can, you don’t get a louder amplified sound than if you pick more softly, because the preamp (or pedal or whatever) clips. I drew the diagram in such a way that the noise floor is in the same place, but usually we perceive this as the noise floor getting higher, because we are also increasing the total volume. (Assuming that our amplifier doesn’t add that much noise, then it’s ok to consider increasing the noise floor as being the same as reducing the maximum output.) The end result is less dynamic range. If you add more and more gain, then you really do lose dynamics. So if you can somehow push that noise floor down, then you can play with more dynamics and you can crank up the gain even more before the noise is unbearable. For a long time, I played electric guitar without much though of dynamics. I would play hard. Pete Townsend proved that to be a valid approach, but it’s not the only approach and it’s unfortunate if you are led to choose that approach based on technical limitations.
Fishman Fluence pickups, overall, have a lower noise floor than the wound pickups that I have used. However, there’s also another significant difference in the spectrum of the noise. In a typical, wound guitar pickup, the dominant source of noise is the hum from the main electricity, which has a 50 or 60 Hz fundamental in most countries. The amplitude of the signal produced by the pickup is louder in the low frequencies than it is at high frequencies, and likewise for the noise, like this:
In this case, we’ve got roughly the same spectral shape shape for our signal and our noise, so the best we can do is to use a noise gate that blocks out the noise when the total mixture is quiet. (Actually, because we know that the noise is 50 or 60 Hz plus some harmonics, we can use the knowledge to better separate the signal from the noise. This is roughly what the Electroharmonix Hum Debugger tries to do.)
The cleverly and precisely shaped printed circuit boards of the Fishman Fluence pickups allow for an unusual degree of hum cancellation, so the dominant problem for many of the Fluence pickups is not the hum, but actually the hiss of the preamp. The hiss has a different spectral shape to the signal, though. The noise is roughly constant in loudness at each frequency, so we have a situation like this:
You can gate out the noise with a traditional gate pedal, but then you can sometimes be left with a bit of hiss at the end of your notes. As notes decay, they lose their high frequencies much faster than the low frequencies, so the signal-to-noise ratio at high frequencies can get quite bad. You can do better than a traditional gate if you treat each frequency differently, or even if you apply different gating in different frequency bands. The “Noise Reduction” effect in Guitar Rig 5 has an advanced parameter for reducing this kind of hiss (the relevant control is circled in red in the following screen shot). I dial this control up to maximum.
As notes decay, the high frequency band gate blocks out the high frequency noise but lets the low frequency signal pass through. The Fishman Fluence pickups plus either Guitar Rig or the Sentry Noise Gate pedal is my current solution to having low noise, allowing for playing with a wide dynamic range and/or also lots of grinding distortion. If you change the volume control, then the ideal threshold will change. Ideally, the noise gate would be placed before the guitar volume knob. So if you’re using a volume pedal, I would recommend you put it after your gate.
Future ideas
Here are some ideas that I have for additional wiring setups. I haven’t done some of these. Some ideas might break your pickups. I encourage you to rush forward, void your warrantee from Fishman, and remember that I, as a random blogger, provide no warrantee to being with.
Triple single coil in Strat with active single width south pickup in the middle for real in between tones, requires a 5-way super switch plus a toggle (or push-pull) for voice selection.
Switch position
Toggle one way
Toggle the other
1
Bridge voice 1
Bridge voice 2
2
Bridge + middle through middle preamp (out of phase)
3
Middle through bridge preamp, voice 1
Middle through bridge preamp, voice 2
4
Neck + middle through middle preamp (out of phase)
5
Neck voice 1
Neck voice 1
One could also could try swapping signal and ground for the middle pickup passive in the original SSS config.
Open question: can you hack a humbucker to work in parallel by connecting all 3 of the pads together at once? (Probably great for bass!)
I should try out a HSS configuration in my Strat.
The most complex and ambitious configuration is a HSH with the modern set. This requires a super switch, a 4PDT switch, and extra toggle for humbucker voice.
Switch position
Toggle one way
Toggle the other
1
Bridge
Bridge + neck
2
Bridge tap + middle
Bridge + neck inner coils
3
Middle
Neck + middle (parallel)
4
Neck tap + middle
Bridge + neck outer coils
5
Neck
Neck
If you use 3 way on-off-on, then you can also set the voice 1 volume with the same switch, like this:
Voice 2
Voice 1
Voice 1 with reduced volume
Some clever wiring is required.
Conclusion
Fishman Fluence pickups are great and they allow for a wide dynamic range and wonderful tonal versatility. If you do a bit of deduction and experimentation, then you can go beyond the possibilities offered by the stock Fishman wiring diagrams. I presented a few wiring diagrams that I designed for use in my own guitars in the hope that they may also be useful to you. Because the dominant noise source in Fishman pickups is more often the hiss of the pickup preamp, the style of noise gate that’s best suited to Fluence pickups is one that processes different frequency bands with different thresholds.
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