Good Idea - or Bad Idea? Whatcha think?

[myblueperiod]

OKay, here's my dilema. I have a 3 pickup SG which does not sound at all good with it's current electronics configuration. It once did, but I had to tinker with it and forgot how it came factory wired (I can not find a diagram anywhere!) The way it originally came wired was: position 1: bridge/middle, position 2: all three position 3: middle/neck. There were 3 independant pots for volume and a master tone. I'd like to return it to stock, but.. I may try this instead.. please share what you think will be the results.

The pups in it are a Gibson 490T in the bridge and 2 490R's in the mid/neck.

4 1Meg pots. The 3 Volume pots will each have a .001uF and the Tone will be a .02 uF.

What do you think this will produce? I like a nice somewhat bright tone.. Not quite ice pick in the
eardrum type bright.. but bright. However, I tend to associate bright with clean, if I could get a warm, clean tone, that'd be cool too.

[BlueSnMettle]

Re: Good Idea - or Bad Idea? Whatcha think?

Bump, Artie? Robert?

[Robert S.]

Re: Good Idea - or Bad Idea? Whatcha think?

I assume you have a std Gibson toggle switch. What you could do is wire it this way. Connect the bridge and neck pickup hot leads to their respective volume pots. Wire those 2 pots to the switch and run the common out to the tone pot. From the tone pot go to the output jack. Now both of those pickups will switch normally and you'll have a cammon tone control.

Since the middle pickup is always on you don't need to switch it, so just wire the middle pickup to its volume pot and run the mid volume pot out to the same tone pot terminal that you connected the switch output to.

If you wire the volume pots the same way as they do with production LPs with the pickups on the #3 terminals all your volumes will act as a master volume because you'll ground the signal whenever any volume pot is at zero. You'll probably be better off wiring the pickups to the center terminals of the volume pots so that you can mute the mid pickup with the volume pot. I would do this for at least the mid pickup volume so that you can also run the guitar with only one pickup on at a time.

If you want a warmer guitar, lose the 1 meg pots for some 500k pots. Those pickups will be very bright with 1 meg pots.

[jeremy]

Re: Good Idea - or Bad Idea? Whatcha think?

agreed.

490's are brighter pups and with 1 meg i think it might be a little ice picky.
typically a 3 pup gibson will be wired bridge/bridge+middle/neck
i think what rob is talking about is a much better way. wire the three way so you can choose neck/bridge or both then use the mid pups volume to bring it into the picture. robs suggestion about moving the hot wire to the center terminal is almost a must to get the most out of the guitar

[myblueperiod]

Re: Good Idea - or Bad Idea? Whatcha think?

I assume you have a std Gibson toggle switch. What you could do is wire it this way. ...
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That's what I'm going to try. Thanks! I'll try it first with my 500K's before trying to 1Meg.

Any ideal where I could find a decent (easy to use, but nice looking) paint program? Free would be nice.

I'll do up a little diagram for people and maybe it post a link or something for people to refer to in the future.

[myblueperiod]

Re: Good Idea - or Bad Idea? Whatcha think?

agreed.

490's are brighter pups and with 1 meg i think it might be a little ice picky.
typically a 3 pup gibson will be wired bridge/bridge+middle/neck
i think what rob is talking about is a much better way. wire the three way so you can choose neck/bridge or both then use the mid pups volume to bring it into the picture. robs suggestion about moving the hot wire to the center terminal is almost a must to get the most out of the guitar

Yeah, the more I think of it, the more I think I'm going to stick with the 500Ks. It's a really nice guitar, even for an Epi. I tried a Gibson SG Standard and Specials and just liked the sound/feel/PRICE or the Epi. Plus.. I got one of the rarer black models. The black finish and gold hardware with the white pickguard is just plain sexxxy looking!