I am a minimalist's minimalist. I don't want my guitar to sound like 100 different things, I want it to sound like ME.
I play with the stomp-boxes a bit, but overall I really only ever use one of 3 sounds:
1) Bridge humbucker for cranking rocking overdriven stuffs (I can vary the amount of drive with pick attack on low to medium output alnico pickups, which is all I use at the moment).
2) Neck humbucker for anything else that sounds good with a light bit of overdrive but I want to be warm-ish and not overpowering the singing.
3) Neck humbucker split to single coil for things that need to be clean and smooth without any (or nearly no) overdrive at all
I don't like volume or tone knobs (or really knobs as a control type), so I have started doing my guitars with just switches. I am still working on my 'final wiring schema', but basically I am doing:
A) Switch of some kind to switch between pickups (have done 3 way and 5 way)
B) A mini switch (3 position) to do off, on, and special (usually split coil)
I am thinking my next time around, I will do it this way:
Pickup switch (3 way switch, 2 humbuckers)
Mini switch will switch as follows:
Pos1: Off (short hot to ground)
Pos2: Normal/On with output going through a resistor (of yet to be determined size)
Pos 3: Special - Neck pickup split + bypass the resistor used in Pos2.
The resistor in Pos2 is to cool off the humbuckers output a bit so that when switching between split neck and not split neck, I minimize the volume difference between split and not-split. The by-product of removing the resistance (or by-passing it, technically) in 'Special' mode, is that when I switch to the bridge in Pos3, I get that ballsy 'humbucker wired direct to output jack with no resistance to speak of' effect.
The other option I toy heavily with is a single 5 way that just does Off, Bridge, Bridge + Neck, Neck, Neck Split with appropriate resistors in all the positions to keep output volume eveninsh.
YMMV, and my opinions have been known to be out of step with normal.
