frequency response and muddiness. Help!

[uan]

hi, i am a beginner.
last week i built a thunderchief with 10uf replacement of the 1st 680n capacitor. It sounds great. FYI, I'm using a strat with Sen Ash body wood and American standard pickups which mean i have more bass from my guitar especially when switching to neck pickup. In this situation, the thunderchief i built sounds muddy and lack of details on the 5th and 6th string. I use the clean channel of my Fender Princeton 65 amp..

my question is, what should i do if i want to increase the frequency respond around 350-400hz and to substract some of the frequency respond below than 300hz..

please help me because i dont know what to do..

[choklitlove]

what you're asking for is a perfect job for an EQ pedal.  there is a $20 7-band behringer one here: http://www.music123.com/Behringer-Graphic-Equalizer-i156765.music

i think there is a diy eq somewhere, but this is so cheap, why not?

[uan]

thanks for your reply..
but i think the raw tone need to be refined especially the muddy sound before it goes to an EQ pedal. FYI, I've adjusted using the EQ section of my amp.. yes.. the bass respond decrease but the muddy sound was still there..do you get what i mean?

[MartyMart]

Using a 10uf as your first bypass cap is most likely giving you "mud" problems
This increases gain a bit but also bass response into the following gain stage.
Make that cap "original" ( 680n ) or at most a 1uf.
For more body, perhaps try replacing the three 22n caps with 33n's and the last 15n
with a 22n, this should voice it to be a little bigger.
For a touch more sparkle, remove one of the 15k/2n2 sections at the end before the
volume pot.
IMO , the Thunderchief sounds great " as is " and doesn't need adjustment !

MM.

[GibsonGM]

+1, MM.  10uF is a bit much!  I always had trouble with my old Melody Maker going into my Fender Hot Rod amp...too shrill (guitar is mahogany & very thin).  I tried everything to tame the shrill & beef up the signal, including changing many of my effects' caps to larger values.  It did fatten everything up, but you totally lose the 'sizzle' and sparkle of your drive effects.  No amount of tweaking really fixed the issue.  So I bought a Les Paul    The Melody Maker has its uses for certain sounds, just not everything.

I stil find the Fender a tad bright, even with the LP...but taming that brightness (rolling off the treble control too far) kills my 'edge', so I've learned to love it!  It's more a function of WHERE I play than the amp or guitar.  Small rooms enhance that brightness.

It's a good study to look into how distortion/clipping really occurs, and what happens when you clip a complex signal such as that from a guitar.  Overtones which are always present are enhanced (way high, 2 to 10KHz stuff), giving us that growl and bite we all love.   Over-enhancing the lower end, by cranking up caps too much, can defeat the purpose and just turn things into mud, like uan found - sort of an unbalancing towards the bass end.    I truly believe EQ can help out with tweaking that awesome sound, but starting with solid basic tone is a must.  Just my humble opinion...

[uan]

thanks for the replies..

i've restored back the cap to original value(680n at first bypass cap) and it was a huge improvement but i still can hear the muddy sound(but minimum). I was thinking that my 65watt amp can't support some low frequencies of 100watts amp that this pedal tries to simulate. So i swapped it again for 610n (390n+220n) and the muddy has gone..!

i'll try the rest modification that suggested by MartyMart later and perhaps will put a soundclip for reference..

another question,
is there any project that uses a combination of Diode and JFET for clipping? i think it would be more sharp and tight cruncy sound..can i put diode clipping in my thunderchief in order to get more gain..?


p/s: sorry if you can't quite understand my english.. i'd try my best..

[MartyMart]

another question,
is there any project that uses a combination of Diode and JFET for clipping? i think it would be more sharp and tight cruncy sound..can i put diode clipping in my thunderchief in order to get more gain..?

Try Joe's Jfet Vulcan , that's a superb sounding high gain pedal

I've tried using diodes/LED's to ground at the back of a few Jfet sims, with mixed results.
COuld be worth trying, but use a switch so you can easily "lift" the connection, to A/B the
result.

MM.