Mid humbucker wiring ideas?

[pete12345]

Hi all. I'm heading home from university in a week, and have been thinking about modifying my guitar again (nutz syndrome is taking hold ) as I'm getting a bit bored of just having series wiring on my strat.

Anyway, I found some fairly cheap humbuckers here and was wondering about installing one in the mid position. A bit odd I know, but I think you could get some interesting sounds with this S-H-S setup.

My first thought is to treat it as a H-H guitar, with two widely spaced humbuckers. The neck and half of the middle form one, the bridge and the other half of the middle form the other.

With this, I'd probably have a binary tree switching arrangement and an overall phase switch in place of the blade switch, and a 4P3T rotary in place of a tone pot, to select series/parallel/split between the two 'humbuckers'. The 'split' setting would use the neck and bridge coils, cutting out the mid humbucker and making it an S-S. I'd have to go to a master tone instead of my preferred neck and bridge tones, unless I used a concentric pot somewhere.

Any thoughts on this scheme? Am I mad for wanting to put the humbucker in the middle? Any other ideas?

Cheers

Pete

EDIT: I just thought as I posted- it might be better to use a 4-way tele switch rather than the binary tree setup, with the phase switch next to it. Might be easier with one switch instead of two.

[wolf]

Hello Pete,
Maybe this is a bit much but you can always try the "Super Seven Switching" at my site: www.1728.com/guitar6.htm
Yes, it requires seven switches but since you were mentioning about adding a lot of switches, perhaps this isn't too far removed from what you want.
And to see seven guitars wired by this method, please click here:
www.1728.com/super7.htm

[newey]

Well, the 4Caster scheme is quite similar. Just make the N coil of the mid 'bucker as "Mid 1" of the diagram, and the S coil as "mid 2", and wire accordingly. Or, actually, reverse the designations, since my scheme mates the N with Mid 2, and B with mid 1, in the "dual binary tree" switching scheme.



This is the version I'm currently building, which only has parallel inter-pair blending. I also have a revision which adds a DPDT to select for either series or parallel blending of the 2 pairs of coils. I had the guitar built that way, using a push/pull for the DPDT, but I had fitment probs, and I ditched the series inter-pair option in favor of this simpler version.

That funky Ibanez switch that ChrisK deciphered a while back might also have some possibilities for what you want to do.

[ashcatlt]

My mini-strat is not binary tree. I treated the coils the same way you've described, as though it were HH. I used 2 x 5-way rotaries to get series-parallel-one coil-the other coil-off for each of these "humbuckers". A toggle switches series/parallel between the output of these, then there's a phase switch and kill switch.

My implementation (using 2P5T rotaries) leaves it dead when either switch is set to off and the toggle toward series. I think another pole would help avoid this.

The mini only has 2 pots, but I can live without V/T controls. In a full sized strat with 3 pots (or holes therefor) you could do a dual concentric pot Master V+T.

That would also work to get you the two tones in the idea you outlined above.

[pete12345]

Some great ideas there guys I hadn't thought of using binary switching within the pairs- something else to think about. ;D I think one possibility is using a 4-way tele switch between the pairs, with 5 toggles next to it for in-pair switching and a phase switch. That way I could retain all 3 pots for V+2T, and have a 'middle only' setting- the 4-way would then choose internal series/parallel/either coil. This would also allow some of the out of phase combinations to be hum-cancelling. I'm not sure though whether its starting to get a bit complicated to operate.

Pete

EDIT: (another after-posting thought) maybe the above scheme would be easier to work if the 'humbuckers' were rearranged, so that the middle pickup is treated as one humbucker, and the neck/bridge singles as the other. One binary tree would then control the neck/bridge, the other would control the middle humbucker, with the 4-way combining the two.