A distorted photograph of me. (Image is my own work.)
This is the personal story of how my Christian faith ended. I grew up a Christian. While I was in graduate school, faith gave way to doubt and then to an experience opposite of the Apostle Paul on the road to Damascus: anti-metanoia, the dissolution of my Christian belief.
The first and larger part is a snapshot written in 2015, a transitional time when I was still a Christian, but weighed down with doubt. I have not corrected details about myself that later became untrue. For example, it says “But lose my faith entirely I did not,” which was true in 2015, but not later. The second part is a more brief addendum written in 2021 with my post-Christian perspective.
This post has explicit discussion of mental health issues and suicidal ideation. If you experiencing mental health problems yourself, please get help. See https://www.mentalhealth.gov/get-help for some suggestions, or search the web for “mental health help.”
Snapshot from the Christian walk slowed to a crawl, written 2015
Since early 2012, my reading and my learning in church have led me to rethink the reasons that I believe in God and my view of the Bible. Generally, this has been a process of learning new ideas about the world in general (and seeing old ideas in fresh light) that has lowered my estimation of the probability that God exists and undermined my belief that the Bible is inerrant. The new ideas came to me suddenly at particular moments in time, such as when I read "The Black Swan" by N. N. Taleb, but the thorough incorporation of each idea and all its associated implications has been a slow process.
Until these doubts of mine started to set in, I had several reasons for being a Christian. Here are some:
Morality
The inexplicable rise of the church
Creation
Miracles
The historicity of Jesus in the Gospels
Some of these reasons were undermined by things that I read:
I used to think that God's existence leads to an explanation of the history of the church that is better than the explanation that atheism could offer. But reading "The Black Swan" by N. N. Taleb made me think that the church's history needed no further explanation. "The Black Swan" isn't meant to debunk the significance of history of the church specifically -- the book is more about epistemology, statistic and even finance! A "Black Swan" is an improbable event with high impact, like the fall of the USSR, 9/11 or the discovery of penicillin. History comes in jerks and starts with Black Swans of various sizes. While each Black Swan looks improbable by itself, they are actually very common stuff: one in a million chances happen to each of us every day, etc. So I accepted the thesis of the book, but the implications blew a fatal breach in the hull of one of my arguments for Christianity: the church grew boldly and suddenly in the first few centuries but that doesn't imply that Jesus really rose from the dead.
Reading Paul Graham's essay "Lies We Tell Kids" (http://www.paulgraham.com/lies.html) made me think that religions could be highly adaptive and survivable even if they weren't true (see also "Antifragile" by N. N. Taleb). This relates to a thought I've had for a while: why don't I investigate other religions? I collected arguments against religions in general but then they also work against Christianity. In addition, "The Black Swan" also made me think that Christianity was less unique as a religion.
I used to think that pervasive human moral failing substantially supported the Biblical idea of sin. However, reading "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined" by Steven Pinker made me think that psychology presents a sufficiently powerful view of human moral failing (and human love too) that the Biblical idea of sin is not logically necessary. Furthermore, on a more emotional level, I had been carrying around a lot of guilt about some of my more persistent sins. But in the same few years, I improved my self control in some ways and started carrying less guilt around. In itself, that was definitely a good change. But it had a secondary effect too, which, depending how you look at it, was either that I relied on God less or that I was clear minded to see how much my own guilt had been pushing my worldview in some direction.
Other reasons for my believing were undermined without being catalyzed by a specific thing that I read:
Quite some time ago, I had accepted that God could have used evolution to create humanity and that evolution need not be a stumbling block to a careful reading of Genesis. The start of Genesis is highly poetic. But the subtly is that God is no longer logically necessary for humanity. But maybe the Big Bang is evidence for God's existence? It could be, at least until the next scientific theory deflates that step in the infinite regress of whys. I still feel like creation is a marginal win for the theist, if we had to call the fight now.
I gradually abandoned my belief that miracles today were evidence for God's existence. I had stopped going to a Pentecostal church a long time ago and I started going to Campus Church, an independent church that was started by a bunch of Sydney Anglicans (they must have been pretty aggravated with the denomination!). Campus Church seemed to more or less believe that miracles ceased after apostolic times. The leadership of Campus Church took a strong view on the Bible. My impression was that I should take God at his word (the 66 books of the Protestant Bible) and in short, "only a rebellious generation asks for a sign." (Fortunately, this view of miracles helps to shield oneself from the classic arguments against miracles à la Hume.)
My membership and increased involvement in Campus Church, with its strong evangelical focus on the Bible, made it ok for me to carefully and thoughtfully overturn my belief that miracles were evidence for God (it also helped that I didn't see any going on). But I was left with an even bigger problem: suddenly everything hinged on the dogmatic inerrant truth of the Bible! So I had to take my fine toothed comb to the Bible. That lead me to examine what evangelicalism really was and to look deeply at questions surrounding the content of the Bible. For example, why these 66 books and not the deuterocanonical books too? Why include Esther? What's with the writer of Hebrews referring the Janes and Jambres? What about Jude quoting the Book of Enoch as prophetic?! What do scholars think about the dating and authorship of each book of the Bible? What about the New Testament apocrypha, like the Gospel of Thomas? (And who put in those chapter and verse numbers?) Many of these questions are not that problematic to the Christian, but if the Bible is the be-all-and-end-all, then they've gotta be answered.
One leader at Campus Church described the way to accept the Bible with a circular argument. I distilled that circular argument in the following way:
1) Jesus is divine implies 2) Jesus' words are reliable implies 3) all claims in the Bible are true in ways that accord with the literary styles of the Bible implies 1) and 2).
It wasn't quite that simple, but being told to accept a circular argument didn't work for me at all. After reading the pastor's recommended text on evangelicalism, "'Fundamentalism' and the Word of God" by J. I. Packer, I concluded that Packer's brand of evangelicalism is utterly worthless.
I had the confluence of intellectual doubts about my arguments for God's existence and problems with my church's fundamental premises about the Bible. The pastor encouraged me to view my beliefs less in terms of a stack of bricks -- one idea built on another, and more like a spider web of strengthening interconnections. He might have a point there, and I've since learned more about this idea and it is helpful to an extent (see my discussion on foxes and hedgehogs below). But the overall picture at this point is nihilistically black. The real chronological order of the development of my doubts is not exactly like what I've described here. There wasn't really a 'rock bottom' point in time when depression suddenly caved on me as I realized that I needed to fail my wife, friends and my past self by rejecting God's existence and putting my Bible on the fiction shelf. But just as the events of my story are spread over months and even years, so the bad feelings were spread over time and mixed in with plenty of nicer experiences in life (like a happy marriage!). But the bad feelings were there and are still partly there. I felt like a hypocrite when I helped in church activities. We all love people who have lost their faith and it's hard for everyone. I never realized how hard it is for the person doing the losing.
But lose my faith entirely I did not. This is the first time I've carefully written all of this down. I feel like now might be the first time that I've really understood some parts of doubts. For a while I was in a gray fog. I was busy with stuff and it was never fun to just spend a day thinking on these depressing things. When would be a good time to strain my relationship with my wife, make all my Christian friends talk behind my back about how Peter's backsliding is such a shame and unravel my whole worldview to the point where everything is in question and no values remain? I justified delaying because it's better to remain a "weak reed, swayed by every breath of wind" than to become a tree planted in the wrong woods, and partially I think I was right to. One problem is that I know that all the psychological biases lead one to keep obsolete but dearly loved ideas around well past their use-by date, systematically rejecting any evidence to the contrary. If I were really lead to the water of rejecting Christianity, then maybe it's just that I couldn't bear to drink?
At the start of 2014, I decided to devote a month to trying to resolving my worldview. In the end, I concluded that I couldn't fix my doubts entirely in that time, but that I would continue trying to be a Christian. I had decided to follow Jesus, so no turning back. I still have unresolved concerns. Before my doubts began, my judgement was that God probably existed. I mixed in a little bit of Pascal's wager and out came a functionally certain Christianity. Now I have trouble shaking the feeling that God probably doesn't exist. But I crawl on. Moses spent 40 years in the desert and Isaiah was forbidden from wearing pants for some length of time that probably felt longer than 40 years.
A precious few ideas are ingredients of potential salve for my burning. They don't form a complete re-construction of a complete and happy world view, at least not yet.
Reading "Scripture and the Authority of God" by N.T. Wright was encouraging. I like Wright's view of scripture much better than Packer's. I felt like I could keep being a Christian when I read "Scripture and the Authority of God."
I learned about the idea that some people think in "fox" terms, while others think in "hedgehog" terms. (For more detail, see http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/02/20/the-cactus-and-the-weasel/) Hedgehog thinkers form world views that attempt to completely explain what the thinker knows. Hedgehog thinkers can act robustly, easily applying their world views to new situations, however their world views are fragile to disturbances. Fox thinkers collect examples en masse but do not necessarily generalize those examples into a world view. Fox thinkers are fragile in their actions (like when faced with new situations) but they are robust in belief. I am definitely a hedgehog thinker facing the fragility of my own beliefs. My wife is more of fox thinker. Maybe I can learn some of her thinking style. Maybe that's why God put her in my life.
The lead singer of a metal band I like, Tim Lambesis, hired a hitman to kill his wife. (Probably this is evidence that rock music is of the devil.) He was a Christian who lost his faith. I read a transcript of someone's interview with him just before he was sentenced to 9 years. He discussed how Christians often teach people that morality can only be objective and that it can only come from God and how he lost his morality along with his faith. He said something along the lines that morality doesn't need to be fully objective and doesn't need to come from Christianity. (I might not be getting this exactly right, but it's what I got from it.) It's not exactly an argument in favour of Christianity, it's more like an insurance policy for a Christian's morality: if one loses their faith, then they do not necessarily have to lose their morality.
"Antifragile" by N. N. Taleb's presents the idea that definite action should be taken without definite knowledge. Strangely, I've heard that Taleb is an Orthodox Christian. What irony, given that his book kindled my doubts.
Addendum post-Christianity, written 2021
Since 2016, I have no longer been a Bible believing Christian.
Losing my faith meant breaking my identity. I didn't just believe in Christianity, I was a Christian. Take that away and I was in danger of not being. I was depressed and had a degree of suicidal ideation. I saw a counselor for a few sessions and at one point he said that he was excited for me, because I would get a new identity. I was not excited.
Ultimately, his words were in the right direction, but in a form that was not like I expected. I partially credit the writing of David Chapman with saving my life in that crisis through his hypertext book (= website) meaningness.com. One of the key ideas of meaningness.com is that meaning is both patterned and nebulous at the same time. Like a cloud, we can definitely claim that a cloud is in the sky, but when we get to the edges, it's hard to say exactly where the cloud begins and ends. So it is with meanings: they are patterned, definite and real but also nebulous, with fuzzy edges and strange exceptions.
Christianity, as I practiced it, is a beautiful and rigid pattern and it conveniently denies a lot of nebulousness. I was tempted in my moment of crisis to choose a new identity of the same form. Like, say, Communism, or Islam: two other belief systems with perfect and rigid patterning. But my narrow understanding of "identity" was really what was at fault. My new identity is one that tolerates (and maybe one day will embrace) nebulousness. Now I have been too hard on Christianity, Communism and Islam. Many practitioners of these religions may be great at balancing the patterned with the nebulous in many ways. Chapman talks about adult development in terms of numbered stages. Many different belief systems can exist at all different levels of personal development. But for me, Christianity couldn't survive the personal-development-level-change.
Some version of "I" made it through. I regained my sanity and I try to gently walk a new line without treading on my Christian wife and the nascent Christianity of my kids. I continue the discussion of my new identify in Part VII.
Parts II through VI give you some insight into what I was thinking and reading during this transitional time. Then I fast forward to 2022 and Parts VII through X present hindsight reflections of my loss-of-faith journey, plus some details about my current perspectives.
Faith, Doubt and Anti-Metanoia series, part Ø, introduction
I grew up a Christian, but, from early 2012, began to have significant doubts. By 2016, I had abandoned Christianity. Over time, several people have asked about my faith-to-doubt-to-no faith journey, so I am writing a series of blog posts addressing that topic.
The unbelieving Saul became Saint Paul in a process of metanoia. “Anti-metanoia” is my answer to the question, “What would the reverse be?”
This blog post series describes my own path, but I hope you don’t follow the same path. There was too much pain. Take an easier way! Before reading my work, read everything on meaningness.com and convince yourself that meaning is obvious and that nihilism is a mistake.
In some ways, this series represents a regression to the style of the pre-Facebook intensely personal blog, with all the risks such content entails. On one hand, this is a deliberate reveal of my personal journey so that you might know me better, like the “Essays” of Michel de Montaigne. On the other hand, it’s an abstract battle of ideas that are beyond myself and the publication of that battle is a way to expose the flaws in my reasoning to the ultra-violent radiation of internet commentary. (Comments on this blog are and will continue to be disabled. Write your response on your own part of the internet.)
Related blog posts
Three previous blog posts are related to this series:
This is about how to argue well. Especially how to argue with yourself about which worldview to pick. I aspire to have followed my own methods here. Published in 2014, in the midst of this struggle, while I was still a Christian.
This is a less-than-completely-serious analysis of "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth" by Thomas Jefferson. Think of this as the comic relief. Published in 2017, after I stopped being a Christian.
The (long) development of this album spanned a period of disruptive internal change in my life, which is ultimately reflected in the album itself. Mostly in the accompanying words, to a lesser extent in the music itself and probably least of all in the photographs that I included here. The change was something akin to what happened to Saul, simultaneously on the road to Damascus, on the way to becoming the Apostle Paul, and to becoming (temporarily) blind. But for me, the change was sort of the opposite of what it was for Paul: anti-metanoia, perhaps. Under a given condition, x, I passed into a new state, and under another condition, y, I passed into another state, and these two states may have been potential in my earlier self, but only in the sense that they came to be developed under the conditions, x and y. But it is plain that I did not escape the difficulties concerning metaphysical predication in this changing world; indeed, such difficulties included intense personal pain, even mental illness. Not at all to say that this transition and the subsequent pain are somehow decodable from the sounds of my instrumental music, but the echo and reverberation of my changing self is inevitably there, in however ghostly a form.
Roadmap
Much of the material is my personal summaries of books that I read and found useful in my journey. Rather than being straight summaries, they’re intentionally slanted with my opinions, frustrations and criticisms of the works. Refer to my post "A Program of Reading Better" for more details on my method of reading. Read the summaries of books that pique your interest; to go deep, read the whole of the original.
Here’s the roadmap for the series to come:
Part Ø: Introducing a series on faith, doubt and anti-metanoia
This blog post.
Part I: From Christian faith, to doubt, then anti-metanoia
This is the story of my personal journey. The parts that follow are, in many ways, material to support and then to continue this post.
Part II: Against evangelicalism
An original essay grappling with Biblical inerrancy and reason, written in late 2012 / early 2013, while I was still a Christian. To give realism and life to the position that I’m attacking, I also include my summary of “‘Fundamentalism’ and the Word of God: Some Evangelical Principles,” by J. I. Packer.
Part III: A clash of ideas: books summaries from a period of searching
This post presents summaries of several works that I read during my period of searching:
“On Miracles,” by arch-skeptic David Hume
“Mere Christianity,” by the celebrated Christian author C. S. Lewis
“The Meaning of Human Existence,” by the biologist E. O. Wilson
“Jesus: The Human Face of God,” by Jay Parini
“The Swerve: How the World Became Modern,” by Stephen Greenblatt
Part IV: Non-canonical books
Questions about the Bible and what it contains are key to my faith-to-non-faith journey. But what about the books that were considered but ultimately excluded from the Bible? This is my summary of the book “Lost Scriptures” by Bart Ehrman, along with my brief summary of the Book of Enoch.
Part V: Three summaries of Biblical canon scholarship books
This post presents summaries of three books that go deep on how ancient texts were selected for inclusion in the Bible:
“The Canon of Scripture,” by F. F. Bruce
“The Biblical Canon: Its Origin, Transmission and Authority,” by Lee Martin McDonald
“The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance,” by Bruce Metzger
Part VI: On Meaningness
I found meaningness.com by David Chapman to be incredibly helpful. Collected here are some comments and thoughts on Chapman’s wonderful work. After lots of material related to Christianity, this post changes direction. Meaningness.com had a major influence on my thinking and the rest of the series uses the terminology of and makes constant reference to meaningness.com.
Intermezzo: Fast forward to 2022
This post serves to make the transition from material mostly written years ago to material written in 2021 & 2022.
Part VII: My new identity
In this post, I continue the thread that concludes Part I: after Christianity, who am I? Spoiler: pretty much who I was before.
Part VIII: Dodging nihilism better
Above, I mentioned that you shouldn’t follow my path through nihilism. This post makes some guesses at what one should do instead.
Part IX: Answering Eternalist objections to the Complete Stance
This is my own defense of my new approach to meaning, written primarily for myself. The “Complete Stance” is a term invented by David Chapman to describe the simultaneous acceptance of the existence of real meaning (contra nihilism) and the acceptance that meaning is often nebulous. The nebulous character of meaning is in contradiction with what Chapman calls “Eternalism,” which is a stance that artificially fixes meanings. An Eternalist can have easy ways of grounding her or his meanings and conveniently pre-packaged communities to join. Where does that leave someone trying to hold the Complete Stance?
Part X: Next steps in meaning-space
I take a moment to speculate on my future directions and discuss some of my open questions. Where am I going next in the realm of meaning? How does that relate to the larger trends in society?
Conclusion to a series on faith, doubt and anti-metanoia
The conclusion to the series and the mirror image of this blog post.
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.
All designs are licensed to you under the CC0 license. No warrantee, etc.
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