Lil 59 / Vintage stack wiring

huli50

New member
Hi all, first post here.

I just picked up the Lil 59 / Vintage stack set for a Tele build I am working on (my first try at building a guitar). I have a few questions.
1. I see in some articles that Seymour Duncan suggests using a 250k pots for the Lil59, while I generally see that 500k pots should be used on a humbucker. What differences would these pot values make in terms of tone? Is my pickup going to explode if I match it with a 500k pot?
2. I am also considering a coil split wiring option at least for the Lil 59. Should I also split the Vintage Stack in the neck or is splitting a stack humbucker not recommended? I am pretty sure that the top coil of the Vintage Stack is the white/black wiring, so I can split to that coil to make sure it's the one that's closest to the strings. I can also split the Lil 59 to the south coil so that my 2nd pickup position split coil is hum cancelling (if I'm thinking of this correctly).
3. Lastly, I'm also unsure of capacitor selections for the tone pot. I've seen some wiring using a 0.022mF but I think that was for single-coil pickups and 250k pots. Does this change if I decide to use 500k pots or maybe the humbuckers affect this value?

Any advice would be awesome and thanks ahead of time for your thoughts.
 
Welcome to the forum!
I believe these pickups were designed to drop into a stock Tele without changing anything else, so what is in a stock Tele should be just fine. With 500k pots, you get more treble, if you find there isn't enough with 250k. As far as splitting, I find that splitting the little humbuckers really isn't as good of a sound as putting it in parallel. A humbucker in parallel will be brighter but still humbucking, and the little humbuckers seem to do the parallel sound better than split.
 
Awesome advice. Thanks! I'm not interested particularly in increasing overall treble or making the Lil59 something it's not, so I'll stick to 250k per your advice. Parallel instead of splitting is something I didn't consider. I'll look into that further, but that sounds like the way to go. If I do go with parallel/series switching, then is there any advantage to wiring the neck stack humbucker to have a parallel option too?
 
As far as the neck Stack, I would just keep it that way. I don't think you'd get an advantage wired any other way. It is a great sounding pickup as is.
 
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