Varitone Advice

[HorrorshowMusic]

So I'm looking to put a Varitone in my strat, and I'm wondering if i could use a switch like this (http://tinyurl.com/788jqjl) instead of a rotary. If I can, I'd love to know how to wire it up, I can handle basic soldering like pots and pickups, but beyond that it's all a bit over my head.

 

The second question is regarding cap values for the different positions, I can't find much on how the different ones affect the sound and all that. I'd love to get a good range of different sounds, with a few "normal" ones and maybe a cocked wah or something else really out there to mix it up a bit.

 

Any advice would be really helpful.

[tiltsta]

You switch link doesn't seem to work. Anyway, I imagine you can wire capacitors to just about any type of switch you want to. No reason it has to be a rotary switch. How you might do it is another issue, and I can't tell you as I'm not an electronics guy. Maybe get an idea of what you want and ask over at the Seymour Duncan forums, those guys will design you a circuit and draw a nice diagram for the fun of it...as they seem to have a crew of guys who just enjoy wiring guitars.

 

Here is a site with some cap values and sound description/clips of a varitone in the Gibson blues hawk. I have one, and it makes a very big difference in sound with the varitone on in various positions. Not meant to be a complete pic of what you can do with caps, but it should give you some idea of some fairly conventional type sounds.

 

http://www.blueshawk.info/varitone.htm

[WRGKMC]

You need caps and a one henry coil. The coil is the key to the varitone.

Without it all you have is a glorified low pass filter. The coil cap and resistor

makes a complete passive filter like an EQ has.

 

The idea of a rotary is to have 5 different flavors and a bypass position.

You cant get that from a regular switch so you would have to cut down on

the flavors to the number of switch positions. If its a DPDT switch that onlly

allows two positions and a bypass. Hardly worth calling it a varitone.

 

Personally I'd skip the old passive filter and just go active.

I put one of these expanders in one of my strats and it blows the doors off a varitone.

battery lasts for years too.

 

http://guitarheads.net/products/electronics/bcu.html

Or this

http://guitarheads.net/products/electronics/exp.html

[HorrorshowMusic]

Fixed the link. It's a 6 way psuedo-Gibson switch, so it's the same number of options as a rotary.

[WRGKMC]

Found the link and tried to download the PDF file to check the switch condiguration.

I believe it might be doable. You would only have 5 of the six positions to use. One

position has to be nutreal with no connection so you can bypass the tone so you loose

one position with any switch you use.