double check before I start

[sharpgt]

hey I'm still working on my homebuilt guitar. I'm still working on the body routing, but you don't want a status report, you want electronics to eyeball and schematics to peruse.
I would like to mak this a very bright guitar, with plenty of highs coming through the cable (after all, you can always chop off extra high end later). I want to have individual volumes for each pickup, a master tone, and a variable coil-tap for the bridge humbucker.
I'm thinking of wiring my guitar like this and was hoping for some feedback from you GN experts:

The 'fat' is wired to just give one coil a variable short to the ground. I'm wondering what, if any, difference it would make if I wired the third (currently unused) lug of the the pot. to the center lug of the bridge vol.; would this just make it into a volume controll for the second coil, or some weird other effect. I made the 'fat' a 1 Mohm so that it doesn't color the sound. I might change all the pots. to 1 Mohm, but I'll wait untill I hear the guitar to fiddle with that. Same goes for the tone cap. when it comes to fiddling around.
Other than that, does all of this check out as kosher with you guitar wiring expert types?

[hugh]

Everything looks fine at a glance. I wouldn't wire that unused lug of the fatness pot, to the volume pot, though.

If you do that and turn it up all the way, your north coil will be shorted out completely. The south coil will be at full volume, though. As you turn it down, you will start to un-short the north coil, so its volume should rise as the south coil's volume cuts off. At zero, the north coil will be full volume, south off.

I don't think you want that.

Just sort of a detail I noticed, but do your pickups need to point in opposite directions? Usually the pole pieces point outboard, right? Of course that may have just been for the diagram's sake.

[warmstrat]

I agree, it seems generally fine to me, but i'm not 100% sure about that fat control you got there - it doesn't immediately make sense to me. I'd like to defer to JohnH or ChisK or sumgai or someone like that in this matter though, as i'm not sure - it's just a suspicion.

hugh said:

do your pickups need to point in opposite directions?

That's an interesting question. I can't say i've ever seen a guitar with this type of pickup that doesn't have the pole pieces pointing away from the centre of the body - it's clearly some sort of convention. On guitars where the pickups can be coil-tapped, however, and i don't see why you shouldn't tap both in this design, it does have some desirable results. In this case, when the pickups face outwards and you tap both coils, the sounds from each pickup's functioning coil are more different, and thus are considered by most to be a more pleasing sound when combined. In other words, the tapped sounds of your pickups will be "neckier" and "bridgier" if they face outwards, and will closer approximate the sound of a traditional single coil's positioning (like say, in a strat or tele).

[JohnH]

sharpgt - What you show will work, but I'd predict that you may not like the results, particularly if you like bright.

The two volume controls are reverse wired, which is a way of preventing one from interacting with the other at low volume. But the result is that a high impedance is applied to the guitar output and the capacitance of the cable then cuts deeply into the treble at lower volume. This is compounded by the single master tone control. Tone controls are usually on the pup side of the volumes so they can interact with the coils. With two volumes and one tone, it is on the output side, but again it causes the treble to be more deeply cut when the tone control is turned down at reduced volume. Thirdly, the fat control, will indeed operate to provide a coil cut, but it will be almost like a switch, and only make a audible change as the pot arrives at 0. A 100k log would work much better here.

Im speaking from recent experience of rewiring an LP Studio - and I also like bright. I did conventional LP wiring with 2v and 2t controls, but with the tone pots wired per 'Red Rhodes' as here:

guitarnuts2.proboards45.com/index.cgi?board=wiring&action=display&thread=1178267584

with a cut in the track as described there. Also see where ChrisK pointed to on that thread. I also dont really get a blending of Hb to Sc , but the operation is overall is pretty smooth. and it goes from full Hb to a very bright Sc.

John

[sharpgt]

thanks for such prompt responses. no the poles are facing the same way because i just copy/pasted the image to save time.
Thanks for the feedback about that coil cut controll, I'll probably cut the value back to a 100k log. and do a little track scraping to have a complete shunt to ground at full counter clockwise. On the other hand, pickups are only wound to about 5-10k ohms so wouldn't a really low value of pot., say 10-15k ohm log be a 'best choice' in this situation? the pot only has to provide a higher or lower resistance than the current would be encountering in the pickup, right? or am I talking out of my fanny again?
Q?
So with the reverse wiring on the volumes...will this only affect the brightness of the tone when the volume pots are turned way down or at all times? And will this only affect the treble of the pickup that is turned down or the overall sound of the guitar? Is it possible to remedy this treble losing wiring set up?
Also with the master tone, will it just have a really big jump in the tone cut as i turn it down or will it just cut the treble at all positions (including 0) more than usual? i.e. a greater amount of treble cut added in a log. (-2db at position 3 and -8db at position 5 on the dial) manner or in a linear (always -4db regardless of position) manner.