Members gardo Posted February 15, 2020 Members Share Posted February 15, 2020 Put together a partscaster a while back and after playing it a while I decided the blend pot has to go. It isn’t a “no load” pot so it bleeds off some signal. I found this 5 position rotary switch that I plan to try . It’s advertised to function just like a 5 way blade switch . The guitar has 2 humbuckers with 5 wires including the ground Any creative suggestions for a wiring scheme? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members mrbrown49 Posted February 16, 2020 Members Share Posted February 16, 2020 go here. https://guitarelectronics.com/guitar-wiring-resources/2-pickup-guitar-wiring-diagrams/ scroll down to the section " 2 Humbuckers W/ 5-Way Rotary Switch" Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members gardo Posted February 16, 2020 Author Members Share Posted February 16, 2020 Quite a lot of choices It should be fun to consider the options Never knew a place like that existed. Thanks for the info Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members mrbrown49 Posted February 16, 2020 Members Share Posted February 16, 2020 Yeah there are quite a few options. I love out of phase sounds so id probably start with one that offers that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members onelife Posted February 16, 2020 Members Share Posted February 16, 2020 I really like what Paul Reed Smith did with his original Custom 24. He used the five position rotary switch to combine one coil form each pickup, in various configurations, to get some Fender style sounds along with the standard Humbucking sound. The key was flipping the magnet on one of the pickups. This allowed the inside coils from each pickup to be wired together in parallel, producing a bridge/middle strat like sound while continuing to cancel the hum. I have a four pole/five way rotary switch and some nice sounding humbuckers that I'm thinking of experimenting but I haven't figured what I'm going to do with them yet. Unlike the original Custom 24, the guitar I'm planning to use also has a standard Gibson style three way toggle switch. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members gardo Posted February 16, 2020 Author Members Share Posted February 16, 2020 I do like the Strat bridge / middle sound But I have a Strat as well so not sure what I’ll end up with Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members WRGKMC Posted February 17, 2020 Members Share Posted February 17, 2020 With two humbucker, besides the typical 3 way switching I like having them wired Series/Parallel. The differences in drive using various amps and pedals can be pretty good so long as the pickups aren't wound too hot. If the pickups wound over 9K and up wiring in parallel wont have much of a difference. As far as split coils go, I its just the opposite. You usually need a hotter pickup to sound any good split. A typical HB can have a DC resistance of 7.5K. A split reduces that to 3.75K which is pretty weak for creating a decent signal. A typical Strat pickup for example is around 5~6K. 3.75 can sound pretty weak. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members gardo Posted February 17, 2020 Author Members Share Posted February 17, 2020 4 hours ago, WRGKMC said: With two humbucker, besides the typical 3 way switching I like having them wired Series/Parallel. The differences in drive using various amps and pedals can be pretty good so long as the pickups aren't wound too hot. If the pickups wound over 9K and up wiring in parallel wont have much of a difference. As far as split coils go, I its just the opposite. You usually need a hotter pickup to sound any good split. A typical HB can have a DC resistance of 7.5K. A split reduces that to 3.75K which is pretty weak for creating a decent signal. A typical Strat pickup for example is around 5~6K. 3.75 can sound pretty weak. The neck pickup is advertised as 10 and the bridge 14 . GFS fat pats that were left from another project Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members WRGKMC Posted February 23, 2020 Members Share Posted February 23, 2020 On 2/17/2020 at 1:01 PM, gardo said: The neck pickup is advertised as 10 and the bridge 14 . GFS fat pats that were left from another project GFS sells mostly Artec pickups from China. I've bought many sets of Artec pickups and My advice is stay away from anything hot wound. The Chinese have low tech builds. They don't vary the magnet strength as part of the formula when wrapping coils like Dimarzio or Seymour Duncan does. They use only one magnetic strength for their builds which is why they hot wound pickups sound awful. The magnets are too strong for anything but vintage wound coils which typically sound pretty good with the Artec builds. I had to buy maybe a dozen different sets to validate that conclusion. Those are hot wound pickups so you may be OK to split. Not sure how well they might balance together however. The hotter 13K may work split. A single coil is half the total (6.5K) and may be as strong as a Strat pickup. How well it might work with the 10K? Its something you simply have to try. 4.5K even in parallel is still a lot so the 10K may over power it. Its even worse the other way. 10K split (5K) run with a 13K? Some of it involves tone too but you simply need to try them first. Best way is to install them, but leave the wires loose, then use jumper wires with alligator clips to wire them in the various configs to see if they will work that way. Otherwise you waste a lot of time and money wiring them into switches for those settings. This has nothing to do with the topic, but its important information none the less. As you can guess I'm not a hot wound fan unless they are premium pickups which incorporate the magnet strength and coil wire diameter and core permeability as part of the formula. I have allot of experience in this area having worked in electronics so long. When you only change the number of coil turns you throw the Q of the coil out of specs and unable to reproduce the full frequency spectrum. I have several sets of 13K pickups that top out at maybe 4KHz. Vintage wound pickups can produce strong signals as high as 5 and 6KHz. 10K on some bright single coils. I've collected dozens of Hot wound Artec/GHS stuff and that were pulled out as soon as I heard them. I only use vintage wind for generic pickup now because they sound the closest to high quality versions. Hot wound generics are the result of ignorance. The goal in building a good pickup is first get a great frequency response then decide how much of that can be sacrificed making the signal stronger. There isn't an amp or drive pedal out there that cant make a pickup output stronger, add gain, or reduce its tone range. What they cant do is work the other way reducing a pickup that's too hot or add the frequency response back that's been lost. The HF loss occurs as the magnet field is generated. Coil resists fast changes in AC more then slow changes so high frequencies roll off before lows do. The hotter the pickup the more high frequencies are attenuated for a fixed magnet strength. If the HF is gone before the signal is amplified, you aren't going to magically add it back using other circuits. dame thing with the higher gain. If the pickup is clipping the first gain stage, you cannot unclip it in other stages that have gain control. In summary. You can always limit a pickups frequency is its too wide using an EQ. An EQ cant invent frequencies that don't exist. Increasing preamp strength can add gain to a weak pickup signal. Turning preamp strength down cannot put the genie back in the bottle if the signal is too hot, yore stuck with it. There is nothing that can properly correct an impedance too high for a preamp besides reducing coil strength. You'll learn this on your own if you do enough swaps with different types. Hopefully you don't wasn't too much time in the money in the process. As I said, I'd try wiring those pickups using jumpers before deciding to go beyond a normal 3 way switch. Series/parallel doesn't work that great on hot wound because the signals too driven in both settings. If they were vintage wound you'd wind up with one setting that's cleaner and less driven then the other. Both setting still hum buck too. Split coils typically hum badly. Be sure you ground the covers or at lease the pickups base plate if thee are uncovered pickups, otherwise a split coil run through a gain pedal will produce too much hum to be of much use. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members 6down1togo Posted February 23, 2020 Members Share Posted February 23, 2020 You can compensate for the pickup imbalance when split by separating the switched outputs to 2 volume controls. You can then combine the volume pot outputs through a single tone control or use 2 tone controls and combine the 2 volume control outputs at the output jack. This allows you to turn the full humbucker down to match the output of the coil split pickup. I have an Electra Omega that I am rewiring this way. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members gardo Posted February 23, 2020 Author Members Share Posted February 23, 2020 9 hours ago, WRGKMC said: GFS sells mostly Artec pickups from China. I've bought many sets of Artec pickups and My advice is stay away from anything hot wound. The Chinese have low tech builds. They don't vary the magnet strength as part of the formula when wrapping coils like Dimarzio or Seymour Duncan does. They use only one magnetic strength for their builds which is why they hot wound pickups sound awful. The magnets are too strong for anything but vintage wound coils which typically sound pretty good with the Artec builds. I had to buy maybe a dozen different sets to validate that conclusion. Those are hot wound pickups so you may be OK to split. Not sure how well they might balance together however. The hotter 13K may work split. A single coil is half the total (6.5K) and may be as strong as a Strat pickup. How well it might work with the 10K? Its something you simply have to try. 4.5K even in parallel is still a lot so the 10K may over power it. Its even worse the other way. 10K split (5K) run with a 13K? Some of it involves tone too but you simply need to try them first. Best way is to install them, but leave the wires loose, then use jumper wires with alligator clips to wire them in the various configs to see if they will work that way. Otherwise you waste a lot of time and money wiring them into switches for those settings. This has nothing to do with the topic, but its important information none the less. As you can guess I'm not a hot wound fan unless they are premium pickups which incorporate the magnet strength and coil wire diameter and core permeability as part of the formula. I have allot of experience in this area having worked in electronics so long. When you only change the number of coil turns you throw the Q of the coil out of specs and unable to reproduce the full frequency spectrum. I have several sets of 13K pickups that top out at maybe 4KHz. Vintage wound pickups can produce strong signals as high as 5 and 6KHz. 10K on some bright single coils. I've collected dozens of Hot wound Artec/GHS stuff and that were pulled out as soon as I heard them. I only use vintage wind for generic pickup now because they sound the closest to high quality versions. Hot wound generics are the result of ignorance. The goal in building a good pickup is first get a great frequency response then decide how much of that can be sacrificed making the signal stronger. There isn't an amp or drive pedal out there that cant make a pickup output stronger, add gain, or reduce its tone range. What they cant do is work the other way reducing a pickup that's too hot or add the frequency response back that's been lost. The HF loss occurs as the magnet field is generated. Coil resists fast changes in AC more then slow changes so high frequencies roll off before lows do. The hotter the pickup the more high frequencies are attenuated for a fixed magnet strength. If the HF is gone before the signal is amplified, you aren't going to magically add it back using other circuits. dame thing with the higher gain. If the pickup is clipping the first gain stage, you cannot unclip it in other stages that have gain control. In summary. You can always limit a pickups frequency is its too wide using an EQ. An EQ cant invent frequencies that don't exist. Increasing preamp strength can add gain to a weak pickup signal. Turning preamp strength down cannot put the genie back in the bottle if the signal is too hot, yore stuck with it. There is nothing that can properly correct an impedance too high for a preamp besides reducing coil strength. You'll learn this on your own if you do enough swaps with different types. Hopefully you don't wasn't too much time in the money in the process. As I said, I'd try wiring those pickups using jumpers before deciding to go beyond a normal 3 way switch. Series/parallel doesn't work that great on hot wound because the signals too driven in both settings. If they were vintage wound you'd wind up with one setting that's cleaner and less driven then the other. Both setting still hum buck too. Split coils typically hum badly. Be sure you ground the covers or at lease the pickups base plate if thee are uncovered pickups, otherwise a split coil run through a gain pedal will produce too much hum to be of much use. Thanks for the tip Jumper wires are the way to go to see what works Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members gardo Posted February 24, 2020 Author Members Share Posted February 24, 2020 7 hours ago, 6down1togo said: You can compensate for the pickup imbalance when split by separating the switched outputs to 2 volume controls. You can then combine the volume pot outputs through a single tone control or use 2 tone controls and combine the 2 volume control outputs at the output jack. This allows you to turn the full humbucker down to match the output of the coil split pickup. I have an Electra Omega that I am rewiring this way. Thanks ,but I’m using a telecaster type control plate drilled for vol. tone and rotary switch Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Grant Harding Posted February 24, 2020 Members Share Posted February 24, 2020 I really like the way they did it on my Taylor electric. It's 2 mini humbuckers with a 5-way, like so: 1 - neck HB 2 - inside coil neck + inside coil bridge in parallel 3 - neck HB + inside coil bridge 4 - inside coil neck + inside coil bridge in series 5 - bridge HB Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members onelife Posted February 24, 2020 Members Share Posted February 24, 2020 It's important to point out that the DC resistance of a guitar pickup is not a direct measurement of the strength of the output signal. With all else being equal, the DC resistance can give a relative indication if the length of one wire is different than the other. What determines the strength of the output signal is the number of turns of wire in the coil and the strength of the magnetic field. If the magnet and the diameter of the wire are the same in two different pickups then the DC resistance can be used to determine which pickup has more (or less) turns of wire in the coil(s) and can be used to indicate which of the two pickups has a higher output. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members WRGKMC Posted February 24, 2020 Members Share Posted February 24, 2020 21 hours ago, 6down1togo said: You can compensate for the pickup imbalance when split by separating the switched outputs to 2 volume controls. You can then combine the volume pot outputs through a single tone control or use 2 tone controls and combine the 2 volume control outputs at the output jack. This allows you to turn the full humbucker down to match the output of the coil split pickup. I have an Electra Omega that I am rewiring this way. matching impedance using Resistance (pots) is not the same thing as matching it with actual coils. We measure DC resistance of coils to get some ide of how many winds they have but you actually have to match the Henry's of a coil and its magnet strength to get balanced output. Using DC resistance to match coil outputs only works in cases where the differences are mild. Normally a Neck may be 1K less then the bridge. Even less on vintage wound. Some even match in resistance and have similar outputs based on pickup height. You may not be able to balance a 3K different on hot pickups because the outputs are too hot for DC resistance to make much difference. You can wind up with a volume match with a pathetically weak sound quality. I did a bunch of experimentation on this not too long ago on a Bass guitar trying to get a Single coil to match a HP. The HB was about 10K and the single coil half that. The best option was using a 250K pot on the single and 500K on the HB. The only time they sounded good when blended is when the single was dialed back about 1/8 of a turn on the pot at a very specific volume level. Way too edgy for practical use. You could barely breathe on that pot and have it go from full bridge to full neck with very little in between. The cause being two different impedances, and two different dynamic outputs being paralleled. The window tweaking the pots for a balance is way to narrow and impractical for use. I tried a dual single coil after that. It got much closer because the impedance between them was a closer match. It wasn't a humbucker so it still didn't balance in tone or output. I finally found another Humbucker for it and the balance between the pickups was a perfect match. Turning one or the other pot down gave a wide variety of mixed tones. The potentiometers taper is correct for the impedance too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members gardo Posted March 17, 2020 Author Members Share Posted March 17, 2020 On 2/15/2020 at 7:21 PM, mrbrown49 said: go here. https://guitarelectronics.com/guitar-wiring-resources/2-pickup-guitar-wiring-diagrams/ scroll down to the section " 2 Humbuckers W/ 5-Way Rotary Switch" Took me a while to figure things out . The switch was a bit of a puzzle it’s self . The link you posted helped me a lot . Now I understand how everything works and it’s actually quite simple. Now one of these days I can actually wire it up Thanks again Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members gardo Posted March 21, 2020 Author Members Share Posted March 21, 2020 Well everything is shut down so I got a chance to put that switch in . what I want is neck bucker ,bridge bucker and both together. The other 2 positions weren’t that important so I went 1 bridge bucker 2 bridge single, neck single parallel 3 bridge bucker ,neck bucker 4 bridge single ,neck bucker 5 neck bucker 4 has kind of a Strat middle sound I like If I get bored I can always move a couple more wires Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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