Where To Start

[ihocky2]

I am a newbie and am in the design phase of m first project guitar. I have already bought Melvin Hiscocks book. I am planning on ordering a few other refernce materials to get additional knowledge before I get to far involved. MY question is, should I by a book on guitar wiring now or wait. I can go onto Seymour Duncans website or go through Hiscocks book or find schematics for basic wiring just about anywhere and understand them. I currently own only 1 Strat and am building a guitar with 2 humbuckers. I do not plan to do anything with it other than standard wiring. I am not sure if I will be building more after this so I do not know if I will ever get into coil taps, series/parallel, splitting or any of the other stuff (which I know almost nothing about). With only starting off basic is it worth it for me to buy a book explaining all of the other ways to wire up, when I won't be worrying about it for quite some time.

[Southpa]

It all depends on how far into it you want to get. If you are just concerned about wiring up a guitar then all you really need is the internet resources available. It helps to have a good understanding about the basics , ie. grounding, resistance, capacitance etc. not to mention soldering. Its also nice to know what all the components really do and be able to predict how changes in their respective values will change the guitar's sound. If there are books available that are comparable to what you can find on the internet then it would be a worthwhile investment.

[al heeley]

The most thorough forum I have come across on guitar electrics is Gutar-Nutz, quite scary how much specific knowledge exists there, for me it is the holy grail of any wiring query.

http://guitarnuts2.proboards45.com/index.cgi?

[lovekraft]

To expand on what Southpa said, you can learn how to wire almost any reasonable guitar setup by following a few simple rules, or simply finding the setup you want at one of the many websites mentioned here (or, as is becoming very popular around here of late, just ask somebody else to draw it up for you! ). If you're only going to do a few basic mods, or replace/install pickups in your own guitars, then everything you need (and more) is available on the 'Net without much searching - if, on the other hand, you're obsessive about understanding how and why things work, it's probably worth your while to hunt down Donald Brosnac's Guitar Electronics for Musicians and/or Do-It-Yourself Projects for Guitarists by Craig Anderton for a basic course on electronics as applied to guitars. Then there's Dan Erlewine's GP Repair Guide, Hideo Kamimoto's guitar books, and Roger Siminoff's solid body guitar tech guide... and the list goes on and on! You don't absolutely need any of these, but if you're interested, there's plenty of reading out there, and you can get as deep into it as you like. HTH

[ihocky2]

Thanks for the advice. I took a fairly basic electronics technology in high school and deal with some electronic engineering, so I have a pretty good understanding of the components and what they do. I get lost when it gets into any of the alternate pickup wirings and switching, but I have never done any type of research on any of that either. So for now I think I'll forgo the books, at least until I get bored with one of my guitars and decide to mod it.