Wiring diagram P-Rail in HSS Stratocaster

basementmedia

New member
Hi there,

Hope you are all well and keep away from Covid-asshole-19 ;-)

I have bought a P Rail pickup and wonder what's a fancy way to integrate it into my HSS strat. Do you have wiring diagram suggestions with push/pull potis and the standard 5 way Pickup selector?

I already asked Google but didnt get a satisfying answer ;-(

Best wishes
Daniel

Gesendet von meinem SM-A600FN mit Tapatalk
 
Welcome to the forum BasementMedia.

While you can get four different modes out of a PRail pup, (series, parallel, rail coil only, P90 coil only), a lot of feedback in this forum over time about the PRails is that the P90 coil alone sound is an overall great P90 tone and so the best of the four modes, that the Rail coil alone is a little underpowered, and that the In Series mode is too hot / too thick sounding, but that In Parallel mode sounds great and is very satisfying replacement for In Series mode. It would be best for you to do some temporary wiring setup where you can try all four modes and see if you feel the same way about each mode as I mentioned above, and then in Phase 2 re-wire to a permanent configuration where you use only the 2 or 3 modes that you really liked out of the 4. A Seymour Duncan Triple Shot mounting ring with the 2 built-in slide switches is a good way to do Phase 1. An alternative to that is to convert 2 of your guitars pots to push-pull and wire them in a way that gets you all 4 modes. I can post a diagram for that if you're interested.

But if you want to skip the 2 Phase approach, my recommendation would be to wire the Prail to the 5 way switch In Parallel, then have one Push Pull pot to split to just the P90 coil. If you want (since a Strat has 3 pots available), you could setup another pot to split to the Rail coil. And if you really wanted, you could setup the 3rd pot as another push pull, that one giving you the option to change btw In Series or In Parallel mode.

Another option if you wanted to use In Series mode but tame the overly hot/thick sound people say about it, is to convert one of your tone pots into a Spin-A-Split control (and convert the other Tone control to a Master Tone control), which lets you dial out one of the 2 Prailccoils to ground and you can find the sweet-spot In Series where the tone is nice and beefy but not too thick.

I am good at creating custom wiring diagrams, so I can create something for you for the ideas above or other ideas you have, let me know.
 
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Another option worth mentioning is to wire it up so that Position 2 of the 5 way switch auto-splits the Prail to the Rail coil alone - so that Position is that classic combo of Bridge singlecoil and Middle singlecoil, and Position 1 is full humbucker. That gets you very close to having the best options out of a SSS guitar and a HSS guitar. You could still have one of the pots setup as a push-pull to allow you to split the Prail to the P90 coil in Position 1 of the switch (bridge humbucker mode).
 
Thank you so much for helping him out. The main SD site is suspiciously void of good P-Rail diagrams. A few Strat loaded pickguards with the switches from the Triple Shots would be a good idea.
 
I've got my Pelham Blue LP on my bench right now, doing a cool new wiring scheme with my P-Rails. But I want to get it finished and tested before I post about it. Hopefully, later today.
 
Some have said they found the full-series mode on the P-rail was fairly hot and very fat.
Could work great for a Strat, where bridge position tends to be kind of anemic.

I think that would be a good option to try first, maybe with a push-pull to split to the P90 coil.
(Perhaps even autosplit to the rail for a quackier position 2, though that gets more complicated.)
 
I've got my Pelham Blue LP on my bench right now, doing a cool new wiring scheme with my P-Rails. But I want to get it finished and tested before I post about it. Hopefully, later today.

Artie,

Did you post about the results and I just missed it?

Thanks, JT
 
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