HSS wiring Diagram for Screamin Demon(b) + SSL-1(m) + SSL-1(n)

[Lumberjack]

Hello everyone!

I'm about to my first warmoth guitar (flat top soloist body with dirct mounted pickups) and I'm not completely sure about the wiring setup I should choose. I will be using the screamin demon in bridge position and SSL-1 in the mid and neck positions. What kind of wiring diagram would you recommend me for this pickup combination? The only thing additional function, besides volume and tone pots is the humbucker split ability with a push pull volume pot, or tone pot. But then there's the question if the push pull pots even fit inside the soloist rear rout cavity...

Looking forward to your suggestions.

 

[stratamania]

Welcome to the forum...

Seymour Duncan and other sites have good wiring diagrams.

Here is one for example.

http://www.seymourduncan.com/support/wiring-diagrams/schematics.php?schematic=1h_2s_1v_1t_5w_as

Also if you go to the page below and look at the options for Strat you will find others for HSS.

http://www.seymourduncan.com/support/wiring-diagrams/

 

[Lumberjack]

What about the pot values? Seymour Duncan uses 250k pots in the diagram you posted, which is understandable, because the lil humbuckers are usually made to go together with other single coils, which in turn mostly use 250k pots. How would I go about that issue? Should I use two volume pots, one 500k for the Demon and the other 250k for the two SSL-1?

 

[AutoBat]

I'd use 500k pots all around.
Somewhere along the line the guitar universe adopted 250k for singles & 500k for humbuckers. If you're mixing them you might as well go with the higher value.

 

[Lumberjack]

I'd use 500k pots all around.
Somewhere along the line the guitar universe adopted 250k for singles & 500k for humbuckers. If you're mixing them you might as well go with the higher value.

My only concern is that these fairly vintage sounding singlecoils might sound too harsh with 500k pots. They've been designed to function with 250k pots, according to the seymour duncan website. Do you have any personal experiences with vintage singlecoils paired with 500k pots? Is the harshness manageable?

I forgot to ask this question earlier: Can I use short shaft potentiometers for the flat top soloist or am I better advised to use the long shaft models?

Thanks for your help so far, guys!

 

[Cagey]

If you end up with too much high end by using 500K pots, reach all the way over to your tone control and kick it down a notch.

I always buy long shaft pots because you can use them in place of short shaft pots by adjusting the backup nut, but the reverse is not always possible. In the case of the Soloist, there's no pickguard, so chances are the short shaft pots aren't going to work.

 

[Lumberjack]

Thanks for the reply, cagey!

I finally found a nice wiring diagram that I'd like to try out:

http://www.guitar-mod.com/rg_dialatap_11.html

What I don't understand about this wiring diagram is the vol kit yellow thingy beside the volume pot and the no load pot. What are these electrical components? I assume the no load pot can be either 500k or 250k, because it doesn't matter, but what's up with that vol kit? Has anybody tried this particular wiring?

 

[Cagey]

The "Volume Kit" is likely what's usually referred to as a "Treble Bleed" mod. Basically, it's a capacitor or capacitor/resistor combination that's used to maintain your high end as you turn down the volume. For noiseless pickups, it's usually just a .001uF cap. On single coils, there's often a resistor in series or parallel. The article linked above explains it in much more detail if you're interested.

 

[Cagey]

The "no-load dial-a-tap" is just a pot that takes one of the coils on your humbucker to ground in varying degrees, so you can go from a humbucker to a single coil gradually, rather than switching it all at once as is normally done. The "no load" part probably refers to the type of pot it is, where at one extreme of the rotation the pot actually opens up, so there's no load on the circuit.

 

[Lumberjack]

The "no-load dial-a-tap" is just a pot that takes one of the coils on your humbucker to ground in varying degrees, so you can go from a humbucker to a single coil gradually, rather than switching it all at once as is normally done. The "no load" part probably refers to the type of pot it is, where at one extreme of the rotation the pot actually opens up, so there's no load on the circuit.

So the pot value does not matter, right? Whether it's a 250k or a 500k, both work, correct?

Thanks for your answers! I appreciate them very much!

 

[Cagey]

I'm sure either would work, but one may sound different than the other, or behave differently due to taper/impedance interaction. I can't say which is more practical or desirable.

 

[line6man]

The "no-load dial-a-tap" is just a pot that takes one of the coils on your humbucker to ground in varying degrees, so you can go from a humbucker to a single coil gradually, rather than switching it all at once as is normally done. The "no load" part probably refers to the type of pot it is, where at one extreme of the rotation the pot actually opens up, so there's no load on the circuit.

So the pot value does not matter, right? Whether it's a 250k or a 500k, both work, correct?

Thanks for your answers! I appreciate them very much!

250k is far too direct of a load on the coil to give you the behavior you want when you don't want to use the control. (Assuming a typical pickup impedance.) The idea with that sort of thing is to have a resistance that approaches infinity at the end of the rotation, so that you can bypass the control when you want to. That would usually be accomplished with a higher value pot on an audio taper, so that the resistance at the end is high, but rolling down just a hair will take you down into a usable range of control.

 

[stratamania]

On the pot values in addition to what is mentioned above. The Steve Morse Musicmans use 250 K pots and they have a mix of humbuckers and Single coil. This would probably give a darker sound to the humbuckers, but I like Steve Morses tone. You could experiment with either pot value or look for something in between as an average. This value probably originated in Morse's Frankenstein Tele.

Or you can get more complicated and use 250K and then use resistors in the circuit so that when the humbucker is selected the resistor is added to the pot resistance giving 500K and when single coils are selected the resistor is out of circuit leaving the 250K pots. But then if you do a coil split you may want at that point the resistor out of the circuit. I believe Suhr does some of this type of circuitry so perhaps a google search may find something along these lines.

Probably better to start simply with one value or the other and see if it sounds good to you before getting into additional possibilities.

 

[Jumble Jumble]

250k is far too direct of a load on the coil to give you the behavior you want when you don't want to use the control. (Assuming a typical pickup impedance.) The idea with that sort of thing is to have a resistance that approaches infinity at the end of the rotation, so that you can bypass the control when you want to. That would usually be accomplished with a higher value pot on an audio taper, so that the resistance at the end is high, but rolling down just a hair will take you down into a usable range of control.

All makes sense, but they've used a no-load pot, so the load with it turned all the way is infinite (as in, it's just disconnected). However, I would definitely say to use a 500K no-load pot for the spin-a-split to be safe.

I have used 250K volume and tone pots with the Li'l Screamin' Demon and it's fine - you get more brightness than a regular humbucker anyway, because of the narrower sensing window of the pickup.

I have a short-shaft pot in a rear-routed body and it fits just fine. There will be room for a push-pull pot in a rear-routed soloist - they're about the same depth inside the body as a 5-way blade switch.

For the volume kit, wire a 100K resistor and a 0.0022uF capacitor across those two lugs in parallel. You don't actually have to do this, though - the effect is that treble is maintained as you roll off the volume, but on some of my guitars I actually like to have the treble reduce a little more as I roll off. It's just a personal preference.

I have some video demos of the Li'l Screamin' Demon, which use 250K pots. Apologies for the horribly out-of-tune playing in the distorted demo. It's my wife's guitar and I can't help pulling the rubber bands she uses for strings out of tune. I'll re-record it with real strings one day.

[flash=560,315]http://www.youtube.com/v/7j5DSGetR7Y?hl=en_US&version=3[/flash]

[flash=560,315]http://www.youtube.com/v/gcNIZu_CCRU?hl=en_US&version=3[/flash]