wiring new harness in HSS strat - neck tone issues

[tomjonesrocks]

Wild stab - looking for wiring help. I am attempting to replace a harness in a HSS Squier 7 String Strat. I'm having tone control issues.

All 3 pickups "work". The humbucker and middle sound good - the neck pickup sounds like the tone is all the way off/down and neither of the 2 controls have an effect. The bottom tone control turns down the tone of the middle pickup and bridge humbucker. The tone knob in the middle does nothing. The volume knob works properly with all 3 pickups. In the diagram I was sent it seems like the bottom tone knob should affect the bridge and the middle tone knob should affect the neck and middle. The 5-way pickup switch selects the pickups as I'd want (all the way down is the bridge, in the middle is the middle, and up is the neck).

The harness specs are - Oak-Grigby 5 way Blade Switch / CTS 500 K Ohm Volume Control with Orange Drop Treble Bled Mod / 2 CTS 250 K Ohm Tone Controls with 1 "MOD" .047 Oil Filled Tone Capacitor (wired so that the tone capacitor works on both tone controls)

Unsure what else to mention. All of the pickup grounds are soldered to the back of the volume knob. The jack ground is soldered to the bottom tone and the jack positive is soldered to volume. On the Seymour Duncan humbucker, the white and red wires are soldered together and taped off - the black goes to the switch and the green goes to ground.

Trying to attach pics but unsure what to offer

[newey]

tomjonesrocks-

Hello and Welcome to G-Nutz2!

Sorry, I moved this thread here from the Tone Control Discussions as it is more of a general troubleshooting question.

Your photo is nice and clear, but it doesn't show the side of the 5-way switch where the pots are wired. Nothing obviously wrong from looking at the photo, but if the issue is wiring to one of the pots, we're not seeing that.

In the diagram I was sent it seems like the bottom tone knob should affect the bridge and the middle tone knob should affect the neck and middle.

That's a fairly odd way of setting up the tone controls on a Strat. Historically, the 2 tone controls on a Strat were for the neck and middle pickups, there was no tone control for the bridge pickup. Back in the '50s, amps didn't reproduce treble very well, and Fender felt that players wouldn't want to lose the treble from the bridge pickup. And, since early Strats had only a 3-way selector, one never had more than one pickup operating at a time, so there was no interaction between the 2 tone controls.

That changed when people started filing notches into the 3-way switches to get the "in-between" pickup combinations, which eventually led to Fender making the 5-way switch standard on Strats. Now, however, the 2 tone controls would interact at position 4 (N + M setting) since they are connected together at that position. A common early Strat mod was then to switch one tone control to the bridge instead of the middle pickup, so that one had neck and bridge tone controls only. With no middle tone pot, no interaction. And, with the advent of HSS Strats, having a bridge tone control for the humbucker was desirable.

While Fender still makes "vintage" Strats with neck/middle tone knobs, most of the more "modern" Strats, and especially the HSS ones, are set up with one tone control for the middle and bridge pickups, and the second one for the neck alone. This still leaves the pots interacting at position 4. But, then again, many players don't even notice that because they don't use the tone controls much, they use the amp tone stack.

So, it's a little odd to have the bridge with a separate tone control- although Fender makes so many variations on the Strat it would not surprise me to learn that some HSS models may have the separate bridge tone pot. With that set up, the two pots will be interacting at position 2 instead of position 4.

In any event, my first thought was that, since your problem is with the neck pickup and the neck's tone pot, you may have fried that pot by soldering to it, particularly if you soldered grounds to the pot shell.

First thing to do, however, would be to hit those solder joints on the neck tone control with your sioldering iron, re-melt those connections to be sure they're good and solid. Then, do the same with the connection between the neck tone and the 5-way switch If that doesn't fix it, I would then turn my attention to that pot. Since you'd have to remove the pot to test it, it may be easier just to swap it out if you have a spare.

BTW, those are big honkin' capacitors, probably a bit of overkill. But you said:

with 1 "MOD" .047 Oil Filled Tone Capacitor (wired so that the tone capacitor works on both tone controls)

I see 2 caps, and one is labelled .033 not.047. So not sure what you meant there.

[Yogi B]

A typical tone control is wired using the middle lug and its counter-clockwise (looking from the back casing) neighbour. From the angle of the photo that is the furthest two for the left hand pot (bridge & middle tone control) — for the neck tone control, since it is facing the other way, those are the two closest to the camera: however from the photo it looks as if the nearest lug has nothing soldered to it. I can't quite see to what the connections to the neck tone control are, but based on the other tone control I assume the caps are soldered to the middle lug in both cases. So it is the wire connecting the neck tone control to the switch which should be soldered to the empty lug in the foreground, rather than to whichever lug it is currently.

(Based on your description, dark throughout the sweep, it sounds like it's wired directly to the cap — if it were soldered to the wrong outer lug then it would be dark at "10", but brighten up very sharply even if the knob were turned only slightly downwards to "9", then give little change over the rest of the range.)

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Also an aside, assuming that it uses standard numbering, your treble-bleed cap seems to be on the large side to be used alone. "102" translates to ten, followed by two zeros, in pico-farads: 1000pF = 1nF. This will let a lot of treble through at lower volumes, usually if using a cap-only treble-bleed a smaller value is used e.g. Ibanez use 330pF. Alternatively, if sticking to a larger cap, it would have a resistor in parallel with it (150k—220k) — this reduces the amount of treble that is bled through but also allows some of the 'full-range' signal to bleed through, thus affecting the apparent taper of the volume pot, so that it doesn't cut the volume as quickly.

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P.S.

Oct 11, 2022 12:22:37 GMT -5 newey said:

BTW, those are big honkin' capacitors, probably a bit of overkill.

How else would they fit in all those MEGA-farads?

[unreg]

Oct 11, 2022 13:22:33 GMT -5 Yogi B said:

Oct 11, 2022 12:22:37 GMT -5 newey said:

BTW, those are big honkin' capacitors, probably a bit of overkill.

How else would they fit in all those MEGA-farads?

“MEGA-farads” bc not even 1 mega-farad exists there. If a mega-farad == $1.00, then it holds just less than 3 and 1/3 cents. Yogi B, I know you were being sarcastic but someone could live in that capacitor, build a sound-proof music room successfully without forced delay, and live happily bc I’m sure gigantic capacitors do not have deed restrictions.

[newey]

The fact that the manufacturer didn't proofread their label tells me all I need to know about the caps. Even if they had used a lower-case "m" for microfarads, that's still a poor practice as "m" usually means "milli", not "micro".

[thetragichero]

for engineers? sure, not good labeling

for guitarists who are trying to emulate some supposed "better" tone caps using archaic production methods and inconsistent (mfd was super common then, MFD has also been seen... i suppose most typewriters didn't have a mu key) labeling it's about perfect

edit: least we forget, mmfd (micro-micro-farad) was used a lot instead of picofarad

[tomjonesrocks]

Thanks so much for all of your replies here! I discovered that the capacitor on the middle pickup was wired to the same lug as the wire - moving the wire to the far right lug at least allowed the guitar to function. 

How it works now is the middle tone controls the tone for the bridge and middle pickups - and the lower tone controls only the neck. Again this doesn't seem all that common a setup - but at least all 3 pickups work and sound good (to me) regardless of the weird tone knob mapping. May look into the latter issue more closely based on the posts above -