6 position rotary switch

chuck7

Senior Member
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I am going to be setting my guitar up with a Seymour Duncan Vintage P90 in the bridge, and a Seymour Duncan P90 Stack in the bridge.  the stack is actually a humbucking P90.  Does anyone know if I could accomplish something like the fallowing with a 6 way rotary switch?

position 1:  Neck pickup
position 2:  Both pickups in parallel, bridge coils in parallel
position 3:  Both pickups out of phase, bridge coils in parallel
position 4:  Bridge pickup, coils in series
position 5:  Bridge pickup, coil split
position 6:  bridge pickup, coils in parallel

I have no experience with the 6 way rotary, so any info you might have would be great.

 
ibob74,
  Thanks for the link.  That pointed me in the right direction. 

i think to acomplish what I want, I need one 6 position 4 poll switch for choosing between pickups, and one 4 position 4 poll switch for the modes I want to use on the stack.  Seeing that I cant fine a 4 position 4 poll, I think I may go with a second 6 position 4 poll and leave two positions unhooked to get a little bit of kill switch functionality for that pickup.
 
I think the most usable configuration that would give you the sounds you want would be:

3-position 4-pole: bridge/parallel/neck
3-position 4-pole: series/split/parallel (for bridge pup)
push/pull pot: phase

The part number for the switch is ck1062, you can get them from Mouser.  You need to use a knob with a set screw... trim the shaft and drill a shallow hole for the set screw, worked for me!
 
if those are the only combos you want you could do it with one 4 pole 6 position switch.
i think adding more switches will give redundant positions. and i'd recomend doing the out of phase by wiring through a capacitor, i got the idea from CB and tried it recently and find it more usable than the traditional way. you shift the phase of one pickup rather than reverse it so it doesn't kill output. it solves the problem of adding a ground wire to the neck pickup and desoldering the origonal one from the back plate and doesn't use extra poles on the switch, just replace a jumper with a cap and you're done.

i can elaborate on the specifics and/or draw a diagram if you need it.
 
I think I've decided to go back to my original plan of a standard 3 way pickup selector switch and a single DPDT 3 way on-on-on mini toggle on the bridge pickup for series/split/parallel.  The more I thought about it, I think that tonal variety will be enough to keep me happy.  If anything I might replace the mini toggle with a 5 postion 4 poll rotary and do something like:

coils in parallel
coils split
coils parallel out of phase with cap (thanks DiMitriR33/CB)
"power boost" as described on the Seymour Duncan wireing diagram
Coils in series

 
on those stacked coil humbucking pickups the lower coil is supposed to be out of phase with top coil, the bottom has little out put and is there purely to cancel hum. it does cancel a small amount of signal though. power boost from seymour duncan is when you reverse the phase of the lower coil and it becomes a regular single coil pickup. so the half outta phase with it-self idea may change it's sound but i doubt it will even sound out of phase, infact you are partially correcting the phase while allowing hum. you'll likely want to only use this for the neck pickup, so a tele 4-way for the pup selector will be more intuitve to use, less unused switching in certain selector positions, go 5-way supper switch and you can even have series parallel wireing between pups. that would probably be way to fat to be usable but hey it's just a thought.

i think 4-way tele switch, with the neck half-phased through a cap replacing the series position w/ 3-way on-on-on series split parallel toggle and a push pull pot for phase reversal on the hum cancelling coil for power boost would be cool. or 2 4-ways could get most of those sounds and not have the non hum cancelling parallel position that i doubt sounds too diferent from the hum canceling one. you'd need to find some room in there but it could work.
 
I'm really not that concerned about getting any sort of out of phase sounds, but I would like to have access to the power boost setting.  The 4 way tele switch sounds interesting, but I really like the look and feel of a 3 way LP style switch better.  I wish they made a concentric push pull pot.  I have decided to go with concentrics for each volume/tone set so if I wanted to add a push/pull for the power boost, I would have to add another switch somewhere on the guitar.  I suppose I could just go for a separate DPDT on-on mini toggle... 

So maybe my new plan should be:

3 way pickup selector (neck/both parallel/bridge)
concentric volume tone for neck
concentric volume tone for bridge
3 way on-on-on toggle for series/split/parallel
2 way on-on toggle for power boos

I really think that would give me all the options I'm looking for without over doing the number of switches on the guitar.

I wander if one of those 2 way on-on jaguar style sliders would look better than the 2 way on-on? - edit - No, I think it would look quite silly.
 
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