Passive distortion w/ series switching

[dragonrider1212]

Hi folks,

I'm putting together a cheap Strat with some funky wiring ideas. I've put together a few kit guitars but this is my first time doing serious monkeying with the wiring.

I read an article (written by the excellent guitarist and tinkerer Joe Gore, by the way) which got me thinking about passive distortion and how to get around the volume drop that happens when the circuit is engaged.
So the crazy solution I came up with is to swap the 2nd Tone pot for a distortion blend pot with two shotkey diodes for clipping, go with a master tone control, put a hot humbucker in the bridge position, and wire a DPDT switch with the ability to override the 5-way selctor in favor of the Neck and Middle pickups in series to give a higher output whenever I like, regardless of the current 5-way switch position.

I'm just about ready to start assembly and get into testing my wiring ideas So I figured before I put solder to wire I should do a quick sanity check and ask you all to take a look at my circuit and give feedback.
I've put a fair bit of research into this project but I am still quite green when it comes to designing circuits so any help is much appreciated.




Thanks!

[newey]

Dragonrider-

Hello and Welcome to G-Nuts2!

Our member JohnH has experimented with the use of Shottky diodes for passive distortion. Here is an article on the subject that he wrote:

Passive Clipping Circuits Using Shottky Diodes

His advice is not to expect too much. He also found he preferred a single diode over two.

We had some further discussion of the idea here:

guitarnuts2.proboards.com/thread/851/wiring-help

Your diagram looks fine, but let's get a second opinion before you start in on it, two sets of eyes are better than one. The only suggestion I would make is that you might consider using a no-load pot for the shottky circuit, so that you're not loading the circuit with that pot when not in use.

[dragonrider1212]

Thanks for the warm welcome. I got some offline opinions and went through with the build. everything went pretty smoothly but the wiring diagram for the bridge pick up was inaccurate and I ended up wiring it backwards. oops. I think I'll suffer a thin sounding series mode until the next time I change the strings.