HSS WIRING HELP (again?)

[Lazarus1140]

I apologize if this has been covered. My search for this exact issue has not produced any results.

Please tell me if this is possible ... and if it is, how to do it. I'm building an HSS stratish guitar. I would like to auto split the humbucker so that one of it's coils can be paired with the middle pickup preferrably in parallel. And I would like to do this with a standard 5-way blade switch without push-pull pots or toggle switches (again, if possible). Also, I would like the tone pot closest to the volume pot be for the neck pickup only, and the rear tone pot to be for the humbucker only. So the the middle pickup will not have a tone control.

I wired a guitar like this many years ago, but it was stolen and I threw away my notes when I started trying to go more paperless. And because of my old man bad memory, it's possible that it didn't use a standard 5-way switch. It may have been a Superswitch or Megaswitch.

In switch position 2, the split bridge with its tone control rolled all the way down paired with the middle single coil without tone control plus a little gain produces a slightly honky tone with harmonics jumping at a reasonably low volume.

 

[beaubrummels]

Use one side of the blade switch to handle pickup switching like a typical Strat, then use the other side to auto-split by putting it's common lug to ground and put bridge red+white on the middle lug. Obviously, don't jumper the two sides of the switch like typical Strats, you have to keep them separate because the pickup switching goes to hot and the auto-split side goes to ground. Run the neck and bridge pickups to their respective tones before going to their respective lugs on the switch.

 

[Lazarus1140]

I appreciate your input, but it's almost too much to wrap my brain around. I'll try to draw it and post it, and the maybe you can tell how to correct it if it's wrong. Thanks again!

 

[beaubrummels]

5-way blade switch

The US made CRL switch lugs are oriented like this (C = common, meaning that lug is always connected while the other 1-2-3 are switching)
1 - C
2 - 1
3 - 2
C - 3

So on the left side,

1 - bridge hot
2 - middle hot
3 - neck hot
C - hot to volume then output jack

on the right side

C - ground
1 -
2 - bridge red+white
3 -


Then wire the pickups

Bridge hot > bridge tone control > switch lug 1
Middle hot > switch lug 2
Neck hot > neck tone control > switch lug 3

 

[Lazarus1140]

Awesome!! Thank you!

 

[Lazarus1140]

The Beau Brummels were a tremendous and I'd say vastly underappreciated band.

 

[GuitarDoc]

The Beau Brummels were a tremendous and I'd say vastly underappreciated band.

Yeah. I really liked them back in the day. But one of them always sang just slightly off pitch which was not only annoying but probably had something to do with their loss of favor with the powers that be.

 

[Lazarus1140]

True. Their harmonies on "Just a Little" were very well conceived and relatively poorly executed. Because of the "pitchiness", I had to pick out the parts on guitar to figure them out.

Two last questions about the HSS with bridge auto-split with one volume and neck and bridge tone controls - I should be able to discern this from your help and from some good online diagrams, but I want to ask to be sure. When the bridge is auto-split to combine one of its coils with the middle RWRP pickup, is the screw or lug coil being used? And then, if it is normally the screw coil and I would prefer to use the lug coil, could I simply accomplish this by switching the physical positions of the two single coils?

 

[beaubrummels]

True. Their harmonies on "Just a Little" were very well conceived and relatively poorly executed. Because of the "pitchiness", I had to pick out the parts on guitar to figure them out.

Two last questions about the HSS with bridge auto-split with one volume and neck and bridge tone controls - I should be able to discern this from your help and from some good online diagrams, but I want to ask to be sure. When the bridge is auto-split to combine one of its coils with the middle RWRP pickup, is the screw or lug coil being used? And then, if it is normally the screw coil and I would prefer to use the lug coil, could I simply accomplish this by switching the physical positions of the two single coils?

When red+white goes to ground, it's the slug coil. If you want the screw coil, put it to hot instead of ground. So in my post, right side C-ground becomes right side C-hot instead.

 

[Lazarus1140]

:yourock: