Build a Green Gizmo™ Pickup Re-Voicer Inside Your Guitar 

This is such a cool and powerful upgrade give it a crack!

I did this mod on my crapy J&D Strat copy back in the 90's and then I found those Stellatone pots, which were a pot with a pcb stuck on the back of the pot with 15 different caps

Its effectively a Varitone. A company called Snarling Dog use to do them as a pedal I foolishly sold mine. Luckily I remembered the design of it and have built a few pedals with and without a boost and clipping. Great vids by the way Waylon.

Isn't it a simple varitone ?

increasing capacitance can be deceptive. If you start off with a low (~200pF) Capacitance cable (b4 your first ~1M Ohm buffer/preamp stage), the resonant peak of a typical ~2.5H Strat pickup will then be well above the harshest 3-3.5kHz range and relatively low in amplitude. Adding capacitance can not only put the resonance in that harshest range, but the amplitude increases so it's that much harsher. I do a simpler mod of using a 1.5~2nF cap on the tone knob with my 10' ~160 Sommer Spirit LLX cable with noiseless HiCON jacks. It has the usual reduction of the peak from 10-7 on the knob, but then a peak ranging from 1.6~2.2kHz starts to come up from 7-1. It's very musically useful. The most bite is the 2.2kHz peak at 1, but it's not harsh. The most mellow sounds are in the 4~6 range where the peak level is lowest and the high-end rolled off. You can use separate 1.5~2nF caps coming from the selector switch lugs for each pickup to either tone knob pot so the combined pickup positions keep the same peak freqs. It only makes sense to use it with pickups that aren't any higher inductance than ~4.5H with ~1nF caps and 500k pots, but the effect is less obvious with Steel/Fe core (inside the coils) pickups that already have much less high end than AlNiCo core pickups.

I have never understood why companies persist in using the exact same tone cap value for neck and bridge pickups. All I can surmise is that it is the sheer dead weight of precedent. Does

One way to control the enable of the rotary circuit would be to use a 5 way super switch and then set position one as the bridge with no rotary, 2 being bridge plus the rotary, then pick your 3 favorite combos, like 5 being neck, 4 being neck+middle, and then I like to set 3 to be neck + bridge.

I wonder how much this is worth $$. I am going to put this on my road guitar. I have learned to build them for minimal cost, maximum function and maximum damage to United Scarelines when they get swiped flying thru Newark.... Great Video.

Tone knobs should have originally be doing this. Varying capacitance instead of resistance seems more intuitive( and useful)

Nice, did the same thing a while ago, but with a push/pull from Vol to revoicer, so I could bypass the whole thing.

I recently bought a Jet JS450, I modified it with two Fender Tex-mex single coils and a GFS Dream 180 Humbucker! What do you recommend as a diagram with a 10 way Strat Free-way Blade Switch? 250k or 500k for pot volume? How can I Buy This secret weapon switch! thank you very much for sharing all your knowledge and your passion for music!

I made the equivalent of the Green Gizmo many years ago to easily test the effects of Caps on my Pickups. In the age of powerful Modelers, I've gone to a single Humbucker in the Bridge position, and just dial in my Presets to the tones I want. The press of one button gets everything I want. YMMV

Cool idea! 😀👍

As someone that never uses their tone control I'm really impressed with this. I may combine this with my usual Strat mod which is the neck pickup on/off switch that I'm planning to do on my guitar.

Wow sounds like the Fat 50s pickups from fender on that neck pickup with your mod

I repaired a Yamaha guitar back in 1984 that had this built in. As I recall it was 5 stops.

Just built my own Green Gizmo box! Thanks for making the schematic available!

I reckon this mod would work well with a strat, having 2 tone knobs.

Great method! I did a push pull mod to have two different caps ready onboard, but this is next level!

Thanks for another great video, must try this! Keep up the good work!