HLK for southpaws.

I love Rothwell's Hot Little Knob it's an awesome knob for adding meat to a strat. I bought one and installed it in my Suhr and then bombarded Andrew Rothwell with questions regarding how it would work with the Suhr's dummy coil. After a lot of schematics whizzing about and a fair bit of head scratching it was decided it didn't...

I toyed with removing the £300 Suhr Silent Single Coil system from the guitar (routed underneath the scratchplate) but the middle V60LP on the Suhr isn't reverse wound so that would be of limited use....no worries I'd install the HLK in a bitsa Squier guitar I was monkeying around with.

It's a great gizmo for getting humbucker tones... so much so I left the problem of it being the wrong way around for me as a lefty (or contrarian - juries still out on that one) and inspired by the lovely tones I got from this using Bare Knuckle Pickups Mother's Milks into a Cornell Romany I decided to give my Tokai ES120N (335 copy) a blast through the Cornell using the bridge pickup - which I'd long ignored. There lies another buzzy story essentially distracting me from the HLK for some months.

So I return to the HLK being a great gizmo but the tone works the wrong way for me on the default setting (I like to turn clockwise to gain more treble and the knob wasn't delivering that ... it was my left handedness again... so do I leave it or investigate making a lefty? the latter, after all I get to understand Andrew's amazing design a little better.

I took it apart and copied the trace, struggled to grok what was going on it's nicely smart in a terse way. Here's a diagram - not a schematic and it's for left hander and I'm not saying if the component values are right or not. Why? because Andrew is a great guy, the HLK is £35 delivered, far more robust than the "bug-wiring" I've shown and you'll save time and money buying from him rather than making your own.

In the off position it just works like a normal tone pot (but this one is left handed). Engage it and all sorts of magic kicks off, because the middle coil is now in series with the bridge until you turn the tone pot which now routes the bass frequency from the middle coil (via the tone cap) back making a parallel signal (if my small understanding is correct).

It's a really minimalist, elegant circuit. Speaking from experience, in my opinion this is far more useful than a blend pot. The humbucker tone was pretty good using Bareknuckle Pickup's Mother's Milks - to be honest I preferred the HLK bridge tone to the standard BKP neck tone and I love the neck tone on strats!

I'm a big fan of no tone on a strat bridge - 50s stylee, so the HLK works with that, you get more than enough tonal diversity using the knob - which makes up for anyone freakish enough to want more blanket with their twang.

In the next post I'll hopefully have tested my lefty protoype in my Korean Strat armed with Jess Loureirro 69 Strat pickups mine have a flat pole profile (as I'm a lefty) and a metal plate on the bridge as I want to see how that plays with the HLK :)