Wiring Diagram, Fender American Deluxe Strat SSS 2013-2015

[dylanhunt]

Does anyone have a bead on a wiring diagram for the Fender American Deluxe Stratocaster SSS sold retail during the years of 2013-2015, which is a subset of what is sometimes called the "Third Series" of Am. Deluxe (https://www.fuzzfaced.net/american-deluxe-stratocaster-third-series.html)?

The entire third series, like the Am. Deluxe series before it, used the S-1 push-push pot and some form of a super switch (not a super switch but a discrete one).  However, after 2013, Fender changed the wiring so that you would get the following combinations when the S-1 was pushed down (https://www.deluxeguitar.com/339/2013-fender-s-1-switching-changes/):

Position 1. Bridge pickup in parallel with Neck & Middle pickups in series
Position 2. Neck pickup in parallel with Middle & Bridge pickups in series
Position 3. Middle and Bridge pickups in Series
Position 4. Neck & Middle pickups in series
Position 5. All pickups in series

It is that set of combinations I am looking for.  The earlier versions of the Am. Deluxe involved use of a special cap and out of phase positions (so you would get this for Position 4: Bridge and Neck Pickup Out-Of-Phase, and in Series with Special Tone Capacitor).

It's relatively easy to track down the 2010 and 2004 wiring schemes, as well as 2013/2014 HSS and HSH diagrams.  For some reason, Fender has made it very difficult to find the 2013 SSS wiring scheme using Google, perhaps not even releasing the diagram sheets.

I have also found some other interesting uses for the super switch and S-1 button:

Phostenix Strat X (with super switch and S-1)
guitarnuts2.proboards.com/thread/8876--I don't see any diagrams or useful links on this page however.

Carlos Sanz (with super switch, S-1, and push/pull)
guitarnuts2.proboards.com/thread/8680/sss-parallel-series-tone-controls

If anyone has or knows how to find the 2013 diagram for SSS, I would be grateful if you could share that with me.  Thanks.

[MattB]

Not sure if this is what you want. It's dated 2013 but I see a cap and resistor on the switch.

support.fender.com/en-us/knowledgebase/article/KA-01126

[dylanhunt]

That is it!  Thanks so much, Matt.  It has everything I need.  You're an ace!

I'm not sure why the resistor and cap are there, but my info was from DeluxeGuitar and they were writing from incomplete knowledge, having only the switching scheme ("It looks like the special tone capacitor is gone...").  Having the wiring diagram fills a huge gap and the switching scheme is a match.  I can always leave out the cap and resistor.  To do it with a super switch will take some modding, but this is gets me 90% there.

[MattB]

I took another look at the wiring. I don't think Fender's description of positions 1 and 2 in series mode is really accurate. I haven't traced the whole thing, but with the S1 switch down it looks like the neck ground and middle hot wires are always joined, and the middle ground and bridge hot wires are also always joined. That means in position 1 the neck and middle must be phase reversed. I think that's what I see tracing the connections, but I haven't drawn it out properly, so I could easily be missing something. I'm going to take another look at it when I get chance, but if you figure it out before me I'd love to know what's going on with those two positions.

[sumgai]

Matt,


When you're done analyzing, please post the schematic and your thoughts in the Stock (OEM) Guitar Wiring Diagrams sub-Forum, will you?

Thanks.





sumgai

[Yogi B]

Jan 31, 2023 14:37:56 GMT -5 MattB said:

I took another look at the wiring. I don't think Fender's description of positions 1 and 2 in series mode is really accurate. I haven't traced the whole thing, but with the S1 switch down it looks like the neck ground and middle hot wires are always joined, and the middle ground and bridge hot wires are also always joined. That means in position 1 the neck and middle must be phase reversed.

Agreed, and same about neck being reversed phase in position 2. However, also in position 2, I think the middle pickup is shunted: its hot wire is connected to hot, but so is the bridge hot (which, as pointed out, is connected to middle ground).

---

The 2013-2015 American Deluxe wiring appears to have carried over to the American Elite which superseded it. And in this version of the service manual they've thankfully elected to show the entirety of the wiring on a single "Detailed Wiring Diagram"; cf. the previous wherein it was split (with/without pickup wires) over two pages.

Additionally the Elite has a per-position walkthrough of the wiring, yet that still maintains the same (incorrect) selection labelling.

[MattB]

Feb 1, 2023 1:49:44 GMT -5 Yogi B said:

Agreed, and same about neck being reversed phase in position 2. However, also in position 2, I think the middle pickup is shunted: its hot wire is connected to hot, but so is the bridge hot (which, as pointed out, is connected to middle ground).

You're right, and Fender's own walkthrough shows it very clearly.

Feb 1, 2023 0:31:14 GMT -5 sumgai said:

Matt,


When you're done analyzing, please post the schematic and your thoughts in the Stock (OEM) Guitar Wiring Diagrams sub-Forum, will you?

Thanks.





sumgai

To be honest I was more interested when I thought I was missing some kind of clever wiring trick. I wanted to know how it worked  because I couldn't see a way to do what Fender claimed to have done. Now I know they didn't actually do it I think it's probably not possible so I don't really want to spend any more time on it right now.

It looks like the first position is neck, middle and the 470K resistor in series, in parallel and out of phase with the bridge, and the second position is neck and bridge parallel and out of phase, with the neck grounded through the 10n cap.

 I do kind of want to know what these combinations sound like, because all the reviews I've read are very positive, but I might not get round to that for a while, or ever. The impression I have now is that Fender couldn't actually find a way to get five good series sounds so they did they best they could and added the cap and resistor to bodge the worst selections into something better, but maybe that's unfair.

[dylanhunt]

For my part, MattB and YogiB, I'm grateful for the work you've put into this.  Wow! That walk-through is amazing.  You don't even have to shell out the $2500 to benefit from their attention to detail in the manual.

I am leaning toward not analyzing the original (beyond understanding how the discrete switch works) and instead will focus on the possibility of using a super-switch to accomplish what the 2013 Am. Deluxe SSS switching scheme says the guitar does.  I'm starting with the Fender wiring diagram, though, and having that is an enormous help to me personally. I'll draw up the schematic and wiring diagram for the solution I reach.  I think that will be more helpful to everyone anyway since the superswitch is more powerful and now more affordable, while the price of the more limited discrete switch has risen.

[dylanhunt]

Hey MattB,

I can't believe you didn't mention your scheme over at guitarnuts2.proboards.com/thread/10211/super-series-fender-discrete-switch.  You have the same combinations I was looking for, but you have swapped a NxB for the NxMxB.  I have the latter on a different guitar already with slightly hotter pickups than vintage/modern inductance levels and I'm not a big fan.  So, NxB would probably be better than NxMxB.  Another difference is your PTB tone circuit.  I was originally planning to use a cap-fade circuit that Joe Gore was promoting seven years ago (https://tonefiend.com/diy/new-tone-control-concept/), but that circuit has gotten kicked so many times on this forum, I've rethought that idea.  I've been wanting to try out a PTB circuit.  The RC filter is the part of the guitar that mystifies me the most, so I might as well follow someone else's layout.  That leaves only the difference of the Super Switch, but that is different from the 2013 Am. Deluxe scheme anyway, which uses the hybridt 4p5t switch.  I was planning to translate that to a superswitch anyway.  I ended up ordering the odd hybrid switch, just in case I couldn't solve how to do your design with a super switch.  I solved it this weekend and now have a (messy) method for translating the hybrid to the full super (discrete) switch.  The hybrid switch would save a few soldering points so I might end up using your design (simply swapping the bass-cut and treble-cut controls around).

So, here's my question, MattB: Have you built it?  How does it hold up? It looks like there might be four (of 10) positions with a hanging hot neck pickup, but I don't think that is a problem for me: Position 1, S-1 up/down; Position 2, S-1 up; Position 3, S-1 up.

[MattB]

I haven't built this exact scheme but I have tried all the combinations as part of other setups. I have a cheap Strat copy I use for testing out stuff and I've been going through as many pickup combinations as I can. The selections in the Super Series Strat were some that I liked and thought would work well together.

I don't think the neck pickup hanging from hot is likely to be a problem. I've built a few things with pickups hanging from hot and I've never been able to hear any extra noise. Usually I would try to avoid it, but for the Super Series Strat hanging from hot was the only way I could see to make it work.

[dylanhunt]

Thanks again MattB.  I have built to your scheme twice now (with a few modifications: a Kinman treble bleed [.90nF x 85k], 1nF cap on bass-cut pot, different values on the volume (250k to 500k), bass-cut (reverse-log to log), and treble-cut (500k to 250k) pots, and a 6.8k resistor before cap and ground on the treble-cut).  The first build was cause for celebration as it was the first time I have ever wired up everything correctly the first time (even using a combination of Fender and Seymour Duncan pickups and reverse-polarizing the magnets of the Fat '50 middle pickup, which was RW, but not RP).  It all worked like magic, and probably down to luck as much as my planning; and, of course, due to your great design.

The second build, by contrast, was a comedy of errors--99% due to my own user error(s).  It involved a custom-built Seymour Duncan stacked neck pickup, an SD STK-S4 neck (stacked) pickup in the middle, and an SD (stacked) STK-S6 in the bridge position.  I reverse-polarized the bridge pickup from North string-facing to South string-facing in order to match the custom SD pickup in the neck, and to be RP relative to the middle pickup.  I also reverse wired the Custom neck pickup because I got reverse-phase tones relative to the other two pickups.  Normally, that would be a problem on a coil tap since the tap point is usually not halfway from each end of the coil (from what I can tell, SD production stacks are 71% top coil/29% bottom coil), but Seymour Duncan's custom shop said they couldn't do it any other way than 50/50 (not sure I believe them, but we discussed the order between March and June 2020, at the height of covid logistical problems, and we were all adjusting--I'll cut them some slack).  One might think, as I did initially, that 50/50  distribution of the magnet wire would mean it shouldn't matter whether the signal has the top or bottom coil come first [Note: It shouldn't matter as long as the two coils are not split, which could put the used coil farthest from the strings!  More on that below.].

I still do not have a reliable way of anticipating the wiring direction of these pickups until I listen to the finished product and, since the STK-S4 series is the only stack plus series that Seymour Duncan reverse winds and since I used the STK-S4 neck in the middle, my own idiosyncratic pickup arrangement caused me several headaches.  But now I finally get to the 1% of my problems that I can't explain, but think the problem is related either to the hanging-hot issue or my decision to reverse the wiring on the neck stacked pickup and then split the coils, or both(?).

My intention was to use a push-pull switch (in addition to the S-1 push-push switch) to split/tap the neck and bridge pickups.  However, I got very odd readings on the LCR meter when I wired that up (all pots at 10).  While in Position 1, in one throw position of the push/pull switch, the bridge pickup showed a DCR of 13.45k (as expected for both coils), but in the opposite position I got 4.20k (not 9.63k [top coil], nor 3.8k [bottom coil]).  If I reconfigured the wires so that one position registered normally as the tapped-coil value of 9.63k, the opposite throw position showed 3.75 (not 3.82, which is the bottom coil DCR, and I accounted for temperature changes; nor the red-to-black segment reading that the pickup's solder points gave me under the circumstances: 3.2k).  That led to troubleshooting.

Even when I disconnected the bridge pickup from the push/pull switch and only the neck pickup was connected, the normal Position 1 reading would change for each throw position of the push/pull switch. I don't understand how there could be any communication between the two poles of the DTDP push/pull switch, but things work normally if I don't try to connect the neck pickup to the p/p switch. When the neck was disconnected and only the bridge pickup was connected to the push/pull switch, the switch operated as expected in Position 1 (13.45k and 9.63k). My sense is that it is the hanging hot neck pickup that caused the unexpected results, but I don't know.

Update: I've confirmed that adding a push-pull switch for splitting the stacked neck, along with a hanging-hot neck lead issue resulted in Position 1 giving a result of N + B. This grounded the neck pickup's red and white leads, making the green-to-red segment of the pickup "live" and in parallel with the bridge.  4.2k corresponds to the parallel resistance of N + B, when Neck is split and Bridge is not (I'm not sure why the Bridge side of the switch failed to split the Bridge coils, but that's the only way I could have gotten 4.2k), while 3.75k corresponds to the parallel resistance when only the top coils of the Neck and Bridge are connected in the circuit, in parallel. 

My solution was to avoid tapping the neck pickup, which turned out to be a godsend because eliminating the top coil would have meant that the used coil would be extremely far from the strings.  I hadn't thought about that when I decided to split the middle pickup instead.  The problem is that, having reversed the middle pickup (which is designed to be a neck pickup), in order to get RW/RP results, I would now be eliminating the middle (stacked) pickup's top coil whenever the coil-split was activated.

This seemed like a great reason to use a partial coil split solution.  Installing a resistance of 8k (~6.8k x 1.5k resistors) before ground on the middle pickup pole-side of the switch gives Position 3 a DCR of 8.7k (both coils) vs 6k ("split"), which should have a result loosely equivalent to using slightly more wire on the top coil than on the bottom coil (where the normal top coil would be around 6.2k and the bottom, 2.5k).

In terms of output, what I'm seeing is this (at 100Hz, 350mv):

                        Normal         Split

Neck pickup       1.5H             N/A     

Middle pickup     3.3H            1.6H

Bridge pickup     4.1H            3.8H