Talk:Gibson S-1

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In the course of my work, I met Bill Lawrence a number of times. Bill said the S-1 guitar should be thought of as having one pickup with three coils, as opposed to the guitar having three single coils. The coils were connected in various humbucking combinations, as opposed to being selected separately. The exception to this was the toggle switch, which selected the bridge pickup only, no matter where the rotary switch was set. I found this to be true when playing the S-1. I also have a Gibson schematic of this guitar, which verifies the connections. Gibson also tried some other things on several of its guitars at this time, including the S-1. The volume control was a 300K, as opposed to Gibson's usual 500K. The idea was two-fold: Reducing the potentiometer's value would enable high frequencies to bleed to ground easier, thus resulting in a less trebly sound, and it would also spread the numbers on the knob across the full range of the control more evenly, instead of having the control's function bunched up all at one end, which was a problem for Gibson at the time. I remember having several 70's Gibsons that had controls that were almost on/off switches. The tone control on the S-1 was reduced to a 100K, which was an effort to spread the numbers out across the full range of the potentiometer. Gibson had tried something similar to this in the past. One example is my '54 Les Paul Jr., which has a 500K volume pot, but has a 250K pot for the tone control. Even though many people always keep the tone control on "10", the fact that it is there, and the values of the capacitor and potentiometer are definitely a part of the signature sound of a particular instrument. So, Gibson and Bill Lawrence put a lot of thought into the S-1 and the other models like this, such as the Marauder.