Need some wiring help with.. you guessed it - p-rails! but with a gibson p90 in neck!

[acuralytic]

Ok so I have les paul bfg gary moore edition; great guitar but the stock BB3 is not meant for it at all IMO so i swapped in the p-rails and it sounds MUCH better. No complaints there but I have the p-rails hooked up to a push pull 250k pot and then to a toggle switch SPDT on off on

it's set up like this:

black-> o o
red and white-> o o
green and bare->o o
o o o - going to hot on bridge volume
^--- going to middle tab of volume pot through a 20mF cap (i think its 20 or 22 can't remember right now but i have tons of different ones (in electronic engineering at school).

so sort of a jimy page setup but switching coils

now the SPDT is

o-black coming from bridge push pull pot
o-nothing
o-green coming from bridge push pull pot

how can i hook this up better without spending hours experimenting? I seem to get the rails sound by adjusting the push pull pot now and then switch between humbucker/rails/p90 with the push pull and the toggle gives a strange subtle difference that's almost out of phase sounding.

The thing that trips me up about wiring this is that my gibson p90 is just one wire that goes straight to the volume pot lol no messing around there then this thing has wires all over the place! I am not getting the kind of tonal variety i expected but I do get a monster p90 sound out of the guitar.

I can't complain about the sound but i just want to see what kind of variety of sounds i can get. Also should bare be going to ground instead of being paired with green? and why does my pickup not have output unless i hook it to the cap and piggyback it on to the volume's second knob (jimmy page style). isn't that a bit messed up?

what can i do with my toggle switch and push/pull pot together with these 2 pickups? i also have another toggle and many pots to do spin a splits. I ultimately want to be able to pick rails, p90, or humbucker then also be able to spin a split with them so i can mix them with the neck p90 (for example rails sounds pretty cool in series with the neck p90 but on its own it sucks).

Thanks for any help! I got pics if needed or i can draw it up in autocad or multisim or something.

[GuitarDoc]

Re: Need some wiring help with.. you guessed it - p-rails! but with a gibson p90 in n

Have you considered Triple Shot mounting rings? With the TS you can get humbucker series, humbucker parallel, P-90 coil, Rail coil without the need for any push/pull or toggle switches. However, you could use a p/p sw to get out of phase if you wanted.

The TS would simplify your dilemma. You could get all of what you want, anytime you want with just a flick of a switch mounted right on the mounting ring.

If you've had some electronics engineering classes at school, you should have a multimeter and know how to use it. That knowledge plus the wiring diagrams on the SD site should give you all the info you need. http://www.seymourduncan.com/support/wiring-diagrams/

[acuralytic]

Re: Need some wiring help with.. you guessed it - p-rails! but with a gibson p90 in n

I have certainly considered it after rewiring this guitar about 6 times now and spending 20 hours experimenting lol. However I'm actually in electronic engineering, just finishing up my first year now. It's not that i don't know what i am linking together but the logic behind it is what gets me confused.

Should i go from hot/leads to mini toggle or gibson style 3 way, then those hot leads out to the push pull? or the other way around? and right now i have a 22mF cap thrown in there as well to get a warmer sound but i lose output if i ground it like i've seen in wiring diagrams everywhere! so i connect it to the middle tab of the volume pot and it works fine but i think i end up blending tones together this way but with the push pull, i can hear it go from single coil sounding to p90 to humbucker when adjusting the pot and pushing/pulling but it still sounds like there's a bit of p90 in there.

i guess i'm just a bit picky, i mean i can get a good 8-9 solid tones dialed in that are 100% usable and sound great but they all seem like variations of a p90/humbucker mix. When i coil tap a normal pickup, the sound is distinctly different obviously but here if i coil tap the humbucker, it just sounds like a p90 or the rail, which makes sense of course but doesn't sound that much different than the humbucker.

Perhaps it's just my ears?

thanks for reading my post though i appreciate it. I'll measure the outputs later on, are they listed anywhere? other than just knowing that single coil is obviously less resistance, is the p90 on the prails the same as a normal p90 and the rails the same as say a fender single coil p/u? i guess with the colour codes i'll know but wouldn't mind seeing if they are hitting the spec values either. That must be somewhere on the SD website.

i may just wire up the p90 and rails in series to get a fat sound and toggle between that and the humbucker and then have a separate wire going from the p90 into the push pull so i can choose whether i want it combined or not... i dunno too many possibilities!!

[AlexR]

Re: Need some wiring help with.. you guessed it - p-rails! but with a gibson p90 in n

I had the same issue with the p-rails...I actually had the triple shots so could choose the coil I was splitting to but couldn't tell whether it was the rail or p90 just by listening. My fave tone was the two in parallel. Series was mega hot......not surprising really as it was probably about 14k of 42 gauge wire.

[acuralytic]

Re: Need some wiring help with.. you guessed it - p-rails! but with a gibson p90 in n

I had the same issue with the p-rails...I actually had the triple shots so could choose the coil I was splitting to but couldn't tell whether it was the rail or p90 just by listening. My fave tone was the two in parallel. Series was mega hot......not surprising really as it was probably about 14k of 42 gauge wire.

thank you!! you probably saved me a fair penny on those triple shots. I can wire this thing up all sorts of different ways but ultimately, it's just one pickup so it's not going to sound like 3 entirely different pickups.

That being said.... it's still an awesome pickup with 3 different but similar sounds that are all very useful! I didn't find p90/rail in series to be that hot but it's in the bridge of a BFG LP so it's hollowed out, compared to the p90 neck it's audibly brighter but not more so than a burstbucker.

I kind of feel like throwing my SD Jazz in the neck of my LP but i'd have to reroute it and i've put that LP through enough pain with my mods but i think i could get a better range of tones with an SD jazz and the rails in the bridge.

maybe i'll try them out in parallel, got the soldering iron on anyway