Hoolow body wiring help.

D

drjones

New member
I've been planning on replacing the buckers in my epi 335 for awhile. I decided to put a PG in the neck and a Custom in the bridge. The dream was to hook them up with push/pull volume pots so I could have single coil tones in both the bridge and neck.

However my first attempt failed miserably. All I got was a bad hum. I double and triple checked my wiring against the diagram on the duncan site. I gave up on it for awhile and the guitar minus its electrics spent a few months in its case (Like most of you I have a few other guitars to play also). Anyway I decided a guitar in its case is useless so I decided to attempt to wire it up again. This time I decided to forget about the coil splits and just go with the standard wiring. This time the hum is back with a vengance. I am getting sound out of the pickups, but the tone controls don't give a gradual change in treble like they should, instead they act like a volume when the tone pot is turned down there is no volume.

What have I done? Here I was thinking the hard part would be putting the parts back inside. Its the wiring thats killing me. I have wired up LPs and Strats before without any drama.

I have got 4 x 500k pots and .047 caps. Im pretty certain its a grounding issue but I have no idea how to sort it out.

Thanks guys
 
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Re: Hoolow body wiring help.

hermetico said:
One of the typical issues is to swap the hot and ground in jack. That gives you automatically noise that increases when you touch the strings.
Click to expand...

That could be it.

Wiring a 335 is just like a LP. I hope you put a couple extra inches between pots so they won't pull loose when you put them back thru the F holes. It's a good idea to test it thru an amp while the pots are outside, and again after you put them in, but before you put the knobs on the pots.
 
Re: Hoolow body wiring help.

Turned out it was a dodgy pot. I've wired it all up, I did actually test it all before I put it in the guitar. So ivé got got it all working now.

It sounds awesome, but my only doubt is that when both pickups are selected turning down either volume affects both pickups. IE i turn down the neck pickup and the bridge volume goes down as well, vice versa with the bridge volume. The tone pots work, and the coil splits work like they should. I thought the volumes should work independant of each other though. Is this right? If not, how do I fix it?
 
Re: Hoolow body wiring help.

drjones said:
Turned out it was a dodgy pot. I've wired it all up, I did actually test it all before I put it in the guitar. So ivé got got it all working now.

It sounds awesome, but my only doubt is that when both pickups are selected turning down either volume affects both pickups. IE i turn down the neck pickup and the bridge volume goes down as well, vice versa with the bridge volume. The tone pots work, and the coil splits work like they should. I thought the volumes should work independant of each other though. Is this right? If not, how do I fix it?
Click to expand...

You can not fix it! It is because the two pups are connected together when used in combination and therefore either volume control affects the overall volume.

I read somewhere that modern verses vintage wiring hookup fix this problem, but I could never get it to work.
 
Re: Hoolow body wiring help.

Hermetico,

That seems pretty simple. Thanks. So I just swap the wires? or do I need to swap the lug that is earthed to the bottom of the pot as well?

Thanks.
 
Re: Hoolow body wiring help.

Thanks Hermetico, i'll try it tonight and let you know how it goes

So how come the diagram on the SD site doesn't show wiring this way?
 
Re: Hoolow body wiring help.

Independend volumes let the the pickup see the wrong side of the pot, so that the sound of the selected pickup looses dramatically highs when rolled down.
Its your choice!
 
Re: Hoolow body wiring help.

Is there a way to retain the highs if I wanted independant volumes?. I really like the sound I get from blending the pups on my LP.
 
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