Hello all, first post here. Not too far back I purchased an Ibanez PWM100 and while I love the look and feel/playability of the guitar, I have not been exactly blown away by the tone. I find the stock Mojotone Hornets to be kind of dead sounding and even muddy given the stock dropped tuning of C# standard and the heavy gauge strings required for it.
After doing a lot of homework and comparisons I selected an Alpha/Omega set because of the clarity it has and the fact that it is tuned to retain that clarity with dropped tunings.
My question is this - the guitar comes with a 3-way selector switch, and a coil split mini-switch. I would like to replace the 3-way with a more versatile 5-way switch (which one, is why I'm here) and open up a wider range of tones from the new pickups. There seems to be endless options for HH wiring and I am open to suggestions but my initial thoughts were:
1 - Bridge
2 - inner coils
3 - Bridge + Neck
4 - outer coils
5 - Neck
Ideally with all of these "default" positions being hum canceling. "Default" meaning unmodified by the micro-switch (thoughts on that below).
While I am not set in stone on that, what I want to avoid is buying a switch that will not let me at least TRY that, as well as other combinations - like how some megaswitches seem to only do one thing. If there is a pretty strong consensus that this actually doesn't give much variety in tone, I'm happy to try something else after I can test this out first. But I'd prefer to buy one switch to rule them all, as it were if at all possible. it seems like many megaswitches for a PRS-style setup do exactly this except for position 3, but I don't know if they can be wired to give both humbuckers.
Further, I'm not sure what to do with the micro-switch. It's an on/off as far as I can tell, so I was thinking it could maybe be a phase switch? or is there a more inventive use for it to give a broader range of options? Flipping coils? Flipping series/parallel for certain positions? Again, very much open to suggestions and not opposed to buying an on/off/on or on/on/on or whatever (assuming it fits) if there is a good reason to change it.
Another challenge here is the S-series body from Ibanez being very shallow. The PWM100 is slightly thicker than a typical S-series allowing a bit more clearance but I know it's going to be a challenge to get a superswitch in there. I know some of the Schaller megaswitches would probably fit (they're about 30mm or 1 3/16" vs the 1 3/8" of many others I've looked at) but none of them do exactly what I want above and I don't have the skill to know how to wire them differently.
A bit about me - I can solder, have done plenty of hobbyist-level eletronic projects but mostly all digital stuff, so while I have the skills to physically do the wiring, every pickup wiring diagram I look at just looks like spaghetti to me. So the "talk to me like I'm 5" rule applies here - nothing should be assumed, talk to me like I'm an idiot please, and provide as much detail as possible for diagrams or resources that might help.
It's an absolutely lovely instrument, I just want it to sound as good as it looks and feels. Thank you so much!
After doing a lot of homework and comparisons I selected an Alpha/Omega set because of the clarity it has and the fact that it is tuned to retain that clarity with dropped tunings.
My question is this - the guitar comes with a 3-way selector switch, and a coil split mini-switch. I would like to replace the 3-way with a more versatile 5-way switch (which one, is why I'm here) and open up a wider range of tones from the new pickups. There seems to be endless options for HH wiring and I am open to suggestions but my initial thoughts were:
1 - Bridge
2 - inner coils
3 - Bridge + Neck
4 - outer coils
5 - Neck
Ideally with all of these "default" positions being hum canceling. "Default" meaning unmodified by the micro-switch (thoughts on that below).
While I am not set in stone on that, what I want to avoid is buying a switch that will not let me at least TRY that, as well as other combinations - like how some megaswitches seem to only do one thing. If there is a pretty strong consensus that this actually doesn't give much variety in tone, I'm happy to try something else after I can test this out first. But I'd prefer to buy one switch to rule them all, as it were if at all possible. it seems like many megaswitches for a PRS-style setup do exactly this except for position 3, but I don't know if they can be wired to give both humbuckers.
Further, I'm not sure what to do with the micro-switch. It's an on/off as far as I can tell, so I was thinking it could maybe be a phase switch? or is there a more inventive use for it to give a broader range of options? Flipping coils? Flipping series/parallel for certain positions? Again, very much open to suggestions and not opposed to buying an on/off/on or on/on/on or whatever (assuming it fits) if there is a good reason to change it.
Another challenge here is the S-series body from Ibanez being very shallow. The PWM100 is slightly thicker than a typical S-series allowing a bit more clearance but I know it's going to be a challenge to get a superswitch in there. I know some of the Schaller megaswitches would probably fit (they're about 30mm or 1 3/16" vs the 1 3/8" of many others I've looked at) but none of them do exactly what I want above and I don't have the skill to know how to wire them differently.
A bit about me - I can solder, have done plenty of hobbyist-level eletronic projects but mostly all digital stuff, so while I have the skills to physically do the wiring, every pickup wiring diagram I look at just looks like spaghetti to me. So the "talk to me like I'm 5" rule applies here - nothing should be assumed, talk to me like I'm an idiot please, and provide as much detail as possible for diagrams or resources that might help.
It's an absolutely lovely instrument, I just want it to sound as good as it looks and feels. Thank you so much!
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