Some questions to humbucker and new electronics (switch and pots)

GuitarOfJustice

GuitarOfJustice

New member
Hello there!

I red the guide and watched some instruction videos, but I have still some questions left:

I would like to buy the Mayhem Set with the two distortion pickups and some new proper electrical parts tone, volume potentiometers and a 5-way switch.

1) Is the Distorition PU build for coil splitt? acording to this article: https://seymourduncan.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360035608834-What-is-coil-splitting-
They have to be purchased with four-conductor wiring . But how do I know a product has this or not? Because I wanna order it in my country in switzerland.

2) What tone potentiometer do I need for those PU's? what resitence? what manufacturer can you recommend? and what capacitor (what capacity?) Does it depends on the PU? If yes, how do you which one?

3) I would like to have in 3rd position of the switch, that both PU's neck and bridge are fully engaged. How is the wiring then? There is only one example on the wiring diagram page.

4) what 5-way switches can you recommand?


thanks alot!
cheers!
Marc
 
Welcome to the forum!

Yes, the Distortion set is 4 conductor, so it has the necessary wires to split it or put in a series/parallel switch. I would use a 500k tone pot. A good tone cap to start with is 022uF- I am not particular about the type of cap, but the value is most important to me. As far as the switching goes, what do you want the 5 positions to be? Most switching schemes will have both pickups on full in position 3.
As far as which switch you might want, this depends on what you want it to do. Fancy switching might require a Superswitch, which isn't difficult to find or wire, but it does require some pre-planning as far as knowing what the switch will actually do.
 
Hey Mincer! Thanks for the reply!

What is the diffrence between a regular 5-way switch an a superswitch?

I would like to have following switch configuration:

Pos. 1: Bridge Humbucker
Pos. 2: Bridge single coil (Humb. split) the one more near to the bridge
Pos. 3: Both Humbuckers full
Pos. 4: Neck single coil (Humb. split) the one more near to the neck
Pos. 5: Neck Humbucker

Is it even possible to choose witch coil for single coil in a humbucker? or is only one of them prepared for single use?
And those my configuration makes sense?

Thanks alot for helping
 
This does make sense, and you can have your choice. A super switch is a 5 way switch with 4 poles, which allow for vastly expanded switching options. If your guitar uses pickup rings, I would suggest Triple Shot rings, which allow for splitting and selecting whatever coil you want. If you don't want to use those, a Superswitch can do what you want, but a regular 5 way switch won't.

Super switch:

Strat5WaySuperSwitch.1.jpg


Regular 5 way:

61R3KxTYHDL._AC_SL1200_.jpg
 
There's actually a few different kinds of super switches. With the 20-lug posted, you can do most anything. But Fender also makes another one that is a normal 5-way on one side, and two sets of 5 discreet lugs on the other half. That version might be enough to handle the splits on 2 and 4 and keep 1, 3 and 5 the full humbucker.
 
okay thanks, and how do I know how to wire this super switch for my configuration?
There is only one wire diagram on the SD website for my hardware (2 HBPU's, 1 Vol, 1 Tone, 1 SuperSwitch) and i t says nothing about the configuration and nothing about the switchpositions. Or did I missed something?
 
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AdrianSD said:
This is where the Seymour Duncan site falls short, for all sorts of wiring combos the best resource I've found so far is https://www.dimarzio.com/support/wiring-diagrams
Once you've found your diagram (if!) all you need to do is to adjust from DiMarzio to SD colour code (e.g. SD hot is black, DiMarzio is red etc)
Click to expand...

okay thanks I will check it out.
I found this one. I guess this is what I'm searching for?
https://d2emr0qhzqfj88.cloudfront.net/s3fs-public/diagrams/2hum1vol1tone_ep1112nb_single_0.pdf
 
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By the way, if I was doing this, and since you're splitting to outside coils, I'd do this slight variation. It's electrically identical, but now, you just connect all four "commons" together, and then jumper to the volume pot.

Split_humbuckers_alt.jpg
 
ArtieToo said:
Yup. But it needed a slight mod, and changed to Duncan colors, to get what you wanted in post #3.

Click to expand...

Wow thank so much Artie Too! that will help for sure!

So the wire translation is:
DiMarzio black/white = SD red/white
DiMarzio red = SD black
DiMarzio green = SD green?


And what switch type is it? they don't name it on the DiMarzio webside, is this a normal 5-way or a super 5-way switch in this wire diagram?
 
Is it possible to do this:

Pos. 1: Bridge Humbucker (standard)
Pos. 2: Bridge Humbucker (parallel)
Pos. 3: Both Humbuckers (standard) full
Pos. 4: Neck Humbucker (parallel)
Pos. 5: Neck Humbucker (standard)

And then splitting the humbuckers to a single coil, but to a "true"-single coil while disconnecting the other passive singlecoil (not short-circuiting)

Pos. 1/2: Bridge single coil (Humb. split) the one more near to the bridge
Pos. 3: Both those single coils (series or parallel, what ever makes more sense and is possible)
Pos. 4/5: Neck single coil (Humb. split) the one more near to the neck

by using two (volume and tone) pull/push-knobs. Like the volume is splitting the bridge HB to a true-singlecoil and the tone the neck.

Is that possible?
 
I don't see how you can get auto-parallel coils vs full humbucker on positions 2 and 4 for both neck and bridge with even a super switch. You have to move 2 wires for each pickup. That would take the whole switch for just the auto-parallel part. I think you are out of lugs to work with. You could do one of the pickups in auto-parallel, but not both. You'd also lose the other pickup split if you do auto-parallel on the first pickup.

You could wire the humbuckers in parallel all the time and then split to single with push pulls. That would be easier.
 
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