An older schematic I drew.

[TooManyWires]

Hey all,

It's been quite a while since I posted here last. I stopped checking the forums everyday back in November or December or so, when all my gear was working ok, and then I guess I forgot to check it for quite a while, really. Anyway, today, for whatever reason, guitarnuts popped into my head, so I decided to check up on it. And the first place I looked was the schematics board, just to see if anything new had turned up, and lo and behold, it had. And it turns out that everyone in the forum has drawn a "perfect cicuit" or some kind of "all combos circuit" or something, and they all look so good that if you were going to build a guitar you'd be hard pressed to pick what you wanted to build. So I scrounged around and found my old drawing of that kind of schematic, that I drew way back on the GN1 forums for Bergermeister I think. I refined it a bit since then. I figured I'd toss it in to be scrutinized, just to try and help people get further confused on what shematic to pick.



So, the diagram is pretty self explanitory as to what it is and what it does. Sorry for the low quality of the image, it's just drawn in MS Paint. Let me know what you think of it. Also, if I already posted a thread like this with this same diagram in it the last time I was on, sorry for the repost, but I don't really remember doing it, so I don't think I did.

Alex

[flateric]

Oh my...............! Do you play live much?

[TooManyWires]

No I don't to be honest. But I don't think that this system is really all that complex. I mean, to be perfectly honest, if you're using a normal (read:stock) strat, how often do you venture outside of Neck and Bridge? You might every once and a while for fun, but those are really bread and butter sounds. Even more so on a HH guitar. And whenever switch 2 is in the neck or the bridge position, it gives you neck or bridge, just like you'd expect on an unmodified guitar. Regardless of what any other switch is doing.

[wolf]

TooManyWires
Here's a good hint for you - if you work with MS Paint, save the diagram as a gif image instead of jpg. That will eliminate all those smudges on the diagram. (Hey, I use MS Paint a LOT - nothing wrong with that).

Now for the diagram-
I'm a bit confused as to what sounds are produced.
You have those 2 columns SW1 and SW2.
A lot of the GuitarNuts schematics are similar to that but there usually is a switch that activates one circuit or another.
So to get the Middle pickup only, you'd have SW1 at position 1 and what else do you have to do?
(I'm guessing that your system produces 10 sounds, correct?)

[dunkelfalke]

brrrr paint is one of the worst bitmap editors.
there are lot of better ones, even for free

[TooManyWires]

Thanks for the paint tip. Will do in the future. Also, what other kinds of programs? I've just always used paint, because it's always been there to use. I have photoshop, but that seems needlessly complex for what I'd use it for to draw diagrams with.

As for how the switching works, there's two 5 way sliders. Switch 1 combines the middle pickup and the bridge pickup. Switch 2 combines the output of switch 1 with the neck pickup. So in order to get the middle pickup alone, switch 1 would be in position 1, and switch 2 would be in position 2.

Here's how it would work layed out in a table:

SW1\SW2	1	2	3	4	5
1	N	M	M+N	MxN	B
2	N	M+B	[M+B]+N	[M+B]xN	B
3	N	(M)+B	[(M)+B]+N	[(M)+B]xN	B
4	N	MxB	[MxB]+N	[MxB]xN	B
5	N	(M)xB	[(M)xB]+N	[(M)xB]xN	B

() means phased pickup, + means parallel, and x means series. Combinations inside square brackets [] are those which the neck pickup is added to when you change switch number 2.

Each row is the combitations you get when you leave switch 1 in one position and change switch 2, and each column is the combinations you get when you leave switch 2 in one position and change switch 1. That means there should be a total of 25 combinations all together, however, since N and B each take up 5, that means there are only 17 unique combinations. This isn't including the N/B phaser, which can put either neck or bridge out of phase at any time, but never both, only one or the other.

Hope that clears things up a bit.

Alex

[sumgai]

Alex,

Welcome back, O Lost One! Indeed you have been away for too long.

(eyes very complex image, explaining TMW's moniker)
Sanity check on Aisle 4, please!

I need to make a WAG here, but did you say that you're using two regular 5-way blade switches, not one 4P5T superswitch?


sumgai

p.s. This really should be moved to Schematics, but what the hey, until RandomHero decides to do so, I'll play here along with everyone else.

[UnklMickey]

i think it's right where it belongs, for now.

this is a complicated arrangement and hard to grasp at first.

there will, no doubt, be lots of clutter and questions.

that may lead to improvements in the text and drawings so that the final version will be more self-explanatory.

some of that has already occurred with the addition of the table for the two 5-ways.

wolf said:

...save the diagram as a gif image instead of jpg. That will eliminate all those smudges on the diagram. ...

and here i thought those smudges were from an erasure. .:lol:.





unk





BTW: welcome back TMW!

[dunkelfalke]

toomanywires said:

Thanks for the paint tip. Will do in the future. Also, what other kinds of programs? I've just always used paint, because it's always been there to use. I have photoshop, but that seems needlessly complex for what I'd use it for to draw diagrams with.

photofiltre for example.

[TooManyWires]

sumgai said:

Welcome back, O Lost One! Indeed you have been away for too long.

Indeed I have been, and it's good to be back.

sumgai said:

did you say that you're using two regular 5-way blade switches, not one 4P5T superswitch?

Actually, it uses 2 4P5T superswitches. One combines two pickups together, and the other adds the third pickup to the output of the first switch.

sumgai said:

p.s. This really should be moved to Schematics, but what the hey, until RandomHero decides to do so, I'll play here along with everyone else.

unklmickey said:

i think it's right where it belongs, for now.

this is a complicated arrangement and hard to grasp at first.

there will, no doubt, be lots of clutter and questions.

that may lead to improvements in the text and drawings so that the final version will be more self-explanatory.

some of that has already occurred with the addition of the table for the two 5-ways.

I'm going to have to agree with unklmickey at the moment. The schematics board is for finished designs, I'm pretty sure, and this isn't really all that finished at all. I put it up here just to see what people think. I really like the idea of 2 5-way switches. I have ever since the Double Barrel switching came out on the original GN site. So when someone on the GN1 forum asked what could be done with 2 superswitches instead of 1 super and 1 normal strat switch, I found out what kind of thing he wanted, and came up with this. Then I tossed in the N/B phaser for kicks.

I can see some flaws with this drawing the way it is already, but I'm not sure how that would effect people's opinions of it. For one, it doesn't currently allow for any combinations of N and B. You get all the combinations of B and M, and you can get all the combinations of M and N using the phaser switch, and you can get a whole whack of strange combinations of all 3 pickups, but you can't get any of N and B. So I'm guessing some people might find that a drawback, but I suspect that could be worked out. It may be as easy as changing the diagram so that switch 1 combines N and B and then switch 2 adds M to the output of switch 1. I'm not really sure how important it would even be to have N and B combos, I'm kind of outside my area of experience here. I'm more of a HH guy than a SSS, so I don't really know what's good and what isn't.

unklmickey said:

BTW: welcome back TMW!

Thanks again.

Alex

[sumgai]

TMW,

Actually, it uses 2 4P5T superswitches.

OMG, and people say I'm looney toons for some of the crap I pull! I've gotta show them your stuff, maybe they'll let me off the hook! ;D

For one, it doesn't currently allow for any combinations of N and B. ...... So I'm guessing some people might find that a drawback.

Yep, I sure would, N + B is a prime necessity when playing my kind of music! But like you said, it can be worked out.

I don't really know what's good and what isn't.

Well, when you do learn what's good and what isn't, will you please share it with the rest of us? I daresay, that's a personal thing, and no one person will ever know what's good for anyone else, only for themselves. But I understand your frustration, so I can only advise you to let it go, grasshopper.... relax, and soon enough, you will be able to grab the stone from my hand before I can close it. ;D


sumgai

[jhng]

I like it.

Cool the way that the N and B positions stay constant while you can alter your in between sounds. Inspires me to try something similar. I don't understand the phasing though.

There was similar overall functionality in the variation on the S-Tastic that I helped Eljib with a while back (it's on a thread somewhere -I'll try and find it and move it to the schematics thread so you can have a look). That used the five-way to combine Neck and Bridge like in the S-Tastic and two push-pulls to bring in the mid pup. (One brought it in in parallel and the other in series, both together gave just the mid pup on it's own).

Hastings

[TooManyWires]

jhng said:

Cool the way that the N and B positions stay constant while you can alter your in between sounds.

Yeah, that was one of it's big selling points when we drew it up. I believe the plan at the time was that it was going to get used on a HHH guitar, and the guy who I was working with was, (like me), a bit more of a LP guy than a strat guy, so N and B were really important positions to have, and the others were jsut for fun, and to get some added functions out of the extra pickup he was going to add. The one I did for him also had some purposeful dead spots. It was so he could get a special tremolo-y sound he wanted or something, or kill the sound completely between songs, I'm not exactly sure anymore. Looked like this at first:

Then evolved to this:

And from there it turned into what I posted at the start of this thread.

jhng said:

I don't understand the phasing though.

Yeah, it's been long enough since I drew it up that I'd be hard pressed to tell you exactly how it works, but when I drew it, I drew a seperate schematic for when every possible switch position combination, just to be sure that it worked, and they all worked out. The phase switch is in two parts, you can phase either the neck pickup or the bridge pickup. I think the reasoning there was so that you could phase at least one pickup in any combination. When I think about it now though, it's really no more convenient than having a phase switch on the neck pickup and another one on the bridge pickup, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.

jhng said:

There was similar overall functionality in the variation on the S-Tastic that I helped Eljib with a while back. That used the five-way to combine Neck and Bridge like in the S-Tastic and two push-pulls to bring in the mid pup.

Oddly enough, I think this started out as a modification of the S-Tastic as well. It took the straight up S-Tastic wiring and added another superswitch to add in the middle pickup in different ways. Looked like this:

The first switch is the one from the GN site, drawn by John A. I copied the wiring directly, I think, and drew the second switch myself. Then I drew another diagram which gave the same exact combinations, but used the same (my) switching logic on both switches. That logic turned into what is at the top of this post, and from there the top of this thread.

Anyway, sorry for the long post, hopefully it should clear up some of how the diagram came to be, and maybe some of how it works.

Alex