The Steel Guitar Forum

I need help on Magnatone Lyric Pickups. I just acquired a dual neck 8 string Lyric (D8/G-85-DW) circa ~1956 Magnatone Lyric steel. The pickups on the outer neck are not as loud as the inner neck. The inner neck sounds great, balsy. The outer neck sounds thin. Temporarily I am setting the louder neck PUP volume down a bit, so that switching my playing between the two necks they have about the same volume. I would like however to get more oomph from the outer neck. The PUPs are the 'oval' chrome tops similar to Magnatone model G-85-DW as seen elsewhere in the forum. By the way, the outer neck tone pot does nothing but cut the sound in-or-out; I tried working a bunch of De-Oxy in both pots to no avail. -Could use a new tone pot I guess.

i would first read all the PUs on a meter and see what they are ohm wise. then straight wire the weaker PUs and see if that makes any difference. magnet pull seem to be equal??

Sounds like your tone cap is shorted... just replace it with another of the same value and it should be just fine.

This would not cause the problem you're hearing, though... I'd say you either have a loose or de-magnetized magnet. Make sure you have the distance to the strings the same... otherwise, I'd just disassemble it and inspect it for problems. If the windings are shorted you should be able to see the difference between the two using an ohms meter.

+1 on checking the resistance of the weak sounding pickup. I've had pickups that are "open" still make a weak, thin sound. It can make the tone control act funny too.

That would be a good place to start.

Thanks all. It turns out that an earlier repair job had switched the leads on one of the Pickups. That neck was the one that was not sounding right. My repair guy switched the neck PUP leads so that both PUPs were oriented correctly and it sounds great. Another pointer regarding the Magnatone twin -PUP- twin neck: the tone pot sweeps between the NEck PUP but itself, both PUPS(best sound) and Bridge PUP by itself. Each tone pot works this way.
_it seems to me that the middle postion is simply both PUP's on.

George Rothenberger wrote:Another pointer regarding the Magnatone twin -PUP- twin neck: the tone pot sweeps between the NEck PUP but itself, both PUPS(best sound) and Bridge PUP by itself. Each tone pot works this way.
_it seems to me that the middle postion is simply both PUP's on.

Sorry for the ancient thread bump, but this was helpful. Question for anyone who might know...if the pickups are wired with a blend pot like mentioned, do we know if they are combined in series like a Stringmaster or in parallel?