Leaderboard

middle tone

Tweed

Senior Member
Messages
453
Making a standard Strat.
I have Seymour Duncan's wiring diagram; I watched a vid of professional Strat wiring. Both of these showed a schematic of the two tone controls affecting only one pickup each.
Can I wire one tone pot to affect neck and middle p/ups? Just connect the pot to two of the corresponding lugs on the switch?
 
Okay.
I'll clarify my words with an edited image

The changes I want to know about are on the right side of the switch.
 

Attachments

Wait, it has to work. Every Jazz Bass has one tone for two pickups.
Thanks guys.
 
You almost have one tone for two pickups with the Strat wiring as well, but they use two pots. Makes the buyer feel better. More knobs per dollar.

Redraw it as a schematic rather than a wiring diagram, and it gets more obvious.

If you must have a tone control, you're better off with one for all three pickups. It's easier to deal with and you save on pots, knobs, wiring and clutter, plus you gain tone control over your bridge pickup. See here. Of course, if you already have a pickguard drilled out, you'll end up with a leftover hole. But, lotsa guys just put a dummy pot there.
 
I've not done it yet, but one day I'm going to use a super switch to create a scheme where the tone controls apply per position, rather than per pickup. So I might have gone 1 apply to neck, neck+mid and mid, and tone 2 apply to mid+bridge and bridge.
 
If you're looking for isolation, that won't do it. Things will still end up in parallel in certain positions.
 
Really? My idea was something along these lines (only showing the relevant stuff):

StratToneControls.png


Essentially you're wiring both tone controls as if they were a master tone, like on a tele - but only one of them is ever actually connected into the circuit.
 
Forget the cartoons. Draw a schematic. Show the signal flow. It's revealing.
 
Yes, yes, very good. ;)

I don't have any decent software for drawing a schematic, and they're useless to me when I actually come to build the thing. I like to plan where I'm going to put wires, and then follow the plan. Drawing a schematic is an intermediate step between deciding the wiring and actually knowing where each wire will go.

I'm not sure what you mean by "things will still end up in parallel". Which things? It's physically impossible in that layout for more than one tone control to be connected to the circuit in any position on the 5-way. That's all I'm after.

I think if you really did want to assign the tone controls to pickups, rather than to positions on the switch, then of course you can't avoid the tone controls being in parallel, because they're coupled to pickups, and the pickups are in parallel.

But there's nothing here that drawing a schematic would reveal. Not to mention of course, that you're the one asserting something, and then asking me to prove it' not true. Not how it works! :D
 
Schematics and wiring diagrams are two entirely different things. Schematics tell you how things work, diagrams tell you how to put them together. If you don't know how something is going to work, it's somewhere between difficult and impossible to put it together. Then, going backwards from how it's put together to how it works is somewhere between difficult and impossible to do. At least, it is for me. Perhaps I have a mental block.

I don't have any good drawing software here, either. At least, not that will run on Linux, and none of my computers use the Windows virus. One of these days when I'm feeling particularly masochistic...

So, I don't know what to tell you other than I'm too lazy to reverse-engineer wiring diagrams, so I'm not going to be much help reviewing wiring schemes. I need to see circuits and components in order to know what's going on.
 
Jumble Jumble said:
I'm not sure what you mean by "things will still end up in parallel". Which things? It's physically impossible in that layout for more than one tone control to be connected to the circuit in any position on the 5-way. That's all I'm after.

I think if you really did want to assign the tone controls to pickups, rather than to positions on the switch, then of course you can't avoid the tone controls being in parallel, because they're coupled to pickups, and the pickups are in parallel.

Cagey just likes schematics because they are much, much easier for him to follow. But your diagram will work as you expect.
 
Ineresting!

"If you don't know how something is going to work, it's somewhere between difficult and impossible to put it together."
- I did that diagram from scratch, knowing how it worked. I guess I could have drawn a schematic in between those two phases but then I would have never needed to look at it again.


"Then, going backwards from how it's put together to how it works is somewhere between difficult and impossible to do."
- that's what the guitar does when you're playing it! And it's what I do when people post diagrams on the internet too.

Really that diagram is already very similar to a schematic. However, here is my attempt.

Schematic-2.gif


To talk through it: the bottom left switch throw controls when the middle pickup is connected to hot. The bottom right controls the other two pickups. The top left throw controls which tone control is connected to hot - ie, it controls which tone control is acting as master tone at that moment in time.

After that it just all goes out to the volume control and the jack as normal - there are no connections from volume to tone, or from individual pickups to tone.
 
That's still a wiring diagram, just drawn in a different style. Tells you almost nothing. What are all those terminal-looking things arranged in rows? Are those a switch, a resistor array, a couple DIP ICs, a set of jumpers, or what? I have no idea, so I don't know how it works. Even if you told me, there are a million questions left. For instance, what are those round things?

then_a_miracle_occurs.jpg
 
I've got everything connected, but have to wait for a neck to arrive.

The centralized grounded location is the back of volume pot. Should I send another ground wire to the metal film shield on the pickguard?
 
if you have another guitar handy, you can hold your neckless body  up to the completed axe, and the pickups will detect the completed guitar's string vibrations - this will allow you to at least get a ballpark idea whether the wiring has come out the way you intended it to.  You could, of course, also hijack the neck from the completed guitar to do some more realistic experimentation.
 
That's an interesting idea that I'd never considered.

Being the lazy ass that I am, I usually use a tuning fork. Bang it on something hard (like my head), and hold it up to the pickup. Gives you plenty of time to figure out which coils are live and whether the volume/tone controls and switches work. Of course, you can always bang your head again if you need to, but you risk being known as a headbanger if you do it too often and people catch you at it.

Forks can be had just about anywhere for about $5-$6 or so. See Amazon.
 
Cagey said:
That's still a wiring diagram, just drawn in a different style. Tells you almost nothing. What are all those terminal-looking things arranged in rows? Are those a switch, a resistor array, a couple DIP ICs, a set of jumpers, or what? I have no idea, so I don't know how it works. Even if you told me, there are a million questions left. For instance, what are those round things?

then_a_miracle_occurs.jpg
Ok, what's the official schematic symbol for a five-pole, four-throw switch?

The round things? Let's see. There's three of them, they're marked with a V and two Ts, and we're talking about a Strat. Still no idea? OK. The round things are the pots. What's the right symbol for those?

You say it tells you almost nothing, but drewfx was able to look at the original diagram and confirm that it'd work how I said it would. If I didn't know better I'd say you were being deliberately obtuse in order to avoid actually looking to see if your hasty judgement on whether it would work or not was correct. I mean seriously, it is SUCH a simple circuit. You're acting like you've no clue what a superswitch is and you've never heard of a volume pot.

Can you link me to a schematic of which you do approve, so I can see wht the different are?
 
I don't have any good drawing software, so here's a crude sketch of some common symbols...

ElectricalSymbols.jpg

Schematics are pretty rare for guitars; most people use wiring diagrams because they don't understand schematics. I'm the opposite. Not that I can live without diagrams - they're generally necessary - but they're too short on functional information so I don't refer to them without schematics. Diagrams leave too many questions open.

Yes, I can be deliberately obtuse, and Drew is a magic man. What can I say <grin>

 
That's actually a pretty useful reference. But yeah, I can't be bothered to do one, I've already done two and I realise I don't actually need to - I know it's going to work!

I'm thinking of trying either a set of SD Stack Plus, or SSL-2/2/6 pickups in my black strat soon; if I do that, I'll try the tone thing with a superswitch too while I'm in there. The idea, obviously, is to have no positions on the 5-way where both tone controls have an effect.
 
I was just about to hit 'post' on this sentence: "The Pot & Resistor schematic look the same"
Then I remembered a pot is a variable resistor :)

I'd love to wrap my head around schematics some day, but I get frustrated easily when I don't get something right away.
 
Back
Top