[iliekwierdstrats]

I have an HH mahogany guitar with 24 frets, neck through body, rosewood board and Double locking tremolo. It only has a master volume and toggle switch, so tonally it's a bit lacking (hehe, get it? No tone knob; tonally lacking ... ) but at the same time I don't want to drill another hole for it. It also has Dimarzio Evolution pickups in it at the moment, which makes it kinda a one trick pony (great at high gain, kinda brittle and a tad ice-picky for medium gain,  low gain and cleans)

I was wondering what some versatile pickups (that sound good relatively good through both a Fender DRRI and a JCM800, despite having no tone control). I'm currently looking at the Dimarzio PAF Master set, PAF Pro set, or Air Norton Neck and Tone Zone Bridge, but I'd like some input on good neck bridge combo's that are usable with a single master volume and no tone knob.

Thanks in advance!

[darkbluemurder]

Depending on how deep the electronics cavity rout is you may be able to use a concentric pot which would give you a volume and a tone control. Alternatively you could use a push-pull pot which would allow you to split the pickups (both of them or only one of them if you wire only one of the pickups to do that) or to put the coils of one of the pickups in parallel. This does not always work however - I have a guitar with a Cabronita body where I can only use a long shaft pot as volume pot, and even that just barely fits.

The DiMarzio humbucker combinations I liked most so far are AT-1 for bridge and Bluesbucker for neck and the Steve Morse set. In fact the Steve Morse set is in a guitar with only a volume control and a 3-way toggle switch (which I may or may not replace with a freeway switch in the future to get more sound options). Both combinations are well balanced. I also had the ToneZone/Air Norton combo for a while in a guitar which was also not bad but a bit too powerful for what I wanted. The AirZone gets a lot of love here but I never played one.

The combination of a medium to hot humbucker in the bridge plus a lower output humbucker in the neck would work well with a single 500k volume pot without a tone control. If you want to simulate a non-existing tone control you can use a 0.022uf cap in series with a 470k resistor from the volume control input to ground. The difference will be subtle but it may be enough.

I would be vary of a PAF type set as the bridge pickup may come across as very bright without a tone control in the guitar. If you use a 500k volume pot I would definitely add a resistor (anywhere from 470k to 1meg) from the hot tab on the switch where the bridge pickup is connected to to ground.

Cheers Stephan 

[garrettj]

I would try the AT-1 bridge and an Air Norton Neck...