P-Rail - I'm stumped, guitar tech is stumped. One P-Rail, two push pull pots

I

in_limbo

New member
Hi everyone.

I'm putting a P-Rail in a Tele deluxe in the bridge position. The neck is remaining a standard humbucker. The wiring was standard Tele deluxe wiring.

I've installed two push/pull pots for the bridge P-Rail so that I can get series/parallel/p90/rail.

A friend and I tried to wire up the pickup according to this diagram, but with hot going to the pickup selector switch rather than the jack.

https://imgur.com/tVufAn6

After two attempts, all we could get it to do was have the tone pot push/pull change the sound in some way. The volume push/pull did nothing. I took it to my guitar tech and he just rang me saying that what I have is not a 5 wire pickup but a 4 wire pickup and so he can't wire it how I'm asking for it to be wired. he says he can wire it with one push/pull to as a coil split or series/parallel only.

I don't know what to tell him. I said there's 4 wires and a bare, and that the bare is the blue in that diagram, but he said the bare just connects to the pickup shield and doesn't do anything.

Can anyone shed some light on this? I'm getting quite frustrated with this thing now as nobody seems to be able to get it to work.
 
Re: P-Rail - I'm stumped, guitar tech is stumped. One P-Rail, two push pull pots

In that diagram, the blue wire is actually the white on any SD pickup - the diagram’s silver wire is the earth wire (bare on SD pickup).

The PRails is no different to any other SD 4-conductor humbucker, so the tech is right ( confusing because, including the bare, there are 5 wires!)

Note, I haven’t checked whether that diagram will work if wired correctly, just correcting the color reference.


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Re: P-Rail - I'm stumped, guitar tech is stumped. One P-Rail, two push pull pots

Just off the top of my head, the center lugs on both push-pulls should not be shorted together. I'll look it over closer, but this cold/flu is putting a crimp in my efficiency.
 
Re: P-Rail - I'm stumped, guitar tech is stumped. One P-Rail, two push pull pots

I thought I had something to say about this, but when I read it back, it sounded like garbage lol.
 
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Re: P-Rail - I'm stumped, guitar tech is stumped. One P-Rail, two push pull pots

You can wire the the pickup to do what you want it to do, but it won’t do it well with two dpdt switches. You could get it to work, but would have to keep a mental truth table, and make sure you don’t accidentally switch into a useless condition.
 
Re: P-Rail - I'm stumped, guitar tech is stumped. One P-Rail, two push pull pots

You could do it easily with a two section sp4t rotary switch, but that will eat your tone control spot. To give an idea, in the most simplistic form you would need a truth table that looked like this:
8968BABF-6132-4452-83B0-B875004C0F2D.jpg

The switching is easily done with the rotary.
 
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Re: P-Rail - I'm stumped, guitar tech is stumped. One P-Rail, two push pull pots

Like others have said, you can't do this with two push-pulls.
 
Re: P-Rail - I'm stumped, guitar tech is stumped. One P-Rail, two push pull pots

ArtieToo said:
Like others have said, you can't do this with two push-pulls.
Click to expand...

You can sort of, but it’s ugly to do it with two push pulls. It won’t work well. Much better to just use a rotary in place of a pot.
 
Re: P-Rail - I'm stumped, guitar tech is stumped. One P-Rail, two push pull pots

Joey Voltage said:
You can sort of . . .
Click to expand...

I just doodled up a bunch of things, and I can't see how you could even do "sort of". Now, you could easily do series/parallel/split with two push-pulls. But you'd have to choose which side you'd want to split to. Not both.

PRail_dual_P-P's.jpg

One nice feature of this is that the series mode always overrides the other push-pull.
Also, the addition of a simple SPDT on-on switch, installed in the "split" jumper, would let you select P-90 or Rail.

Like this:

PRail_dual_P-P's ver2.jpg
 
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Re: P-Rail - I'm stumped, guitar tech is stumped. One P-Rail, two push pull pots

Has OP been back to this thread?


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