Switching Mods/customs

[Sevara]

I'm working on a couple of designs, at the moment, and one of the ideas I've been toying around with is the idea of using rotary switches in place of pots for purposes of tone controls.

The idea:

The guitar has 2 tone switches, one for highs and one for lows. Both are 3-way rotary switches, with the equivalent of a standard pot set at 0, a pot set at 5, and a pot set at 10.

Now, it strikes me that the upsides to this would be that for a gigging guitar, you could have a much more consistent tone, considering the finicky nature of tone knobs, and also for a gigging guitar, the rotary switch having less contact surface would make it a longer time before you have to take the guitar apart and clean the guts to avoid those nasty "dirty pot pops."

However, as limited as my electronics knowledge is, it seems that the downside would be the wiring loop's cumbersome size- unless somebody here has a shortcut I might be missing, this approach would require 3 branches, with "fixed" resistors (say 250uF, 500uF, and 1000uF) for each closed loop. Anybody have any thoughts on this?

[mammoth guitars]

Typically fixed tone positions can be obtained by using trim style pots and pre-adjusting them to taste and using one capacitor. Using a toggle switch provideds a much faster switching method than rotary switches. Further your reference to uF is a capacitor value term not a resistor. And the values 250, 500 and 1000 uF shorted to ground like a traditional tone control would do nothing but act like a volume control. You will need to use much smaller capacitor values. Typcial values are between .047uF to .022uF.

If your reference for fixed resistor was to mean 250k, 500k and 1000k that would not make that much difference in the tone control either, you will need much smaller resistance values. The tone control operates by decreasing resistance between the cap and the output from the volume or the cap to ground. The cap acts like a bypass shunting the higher frequencies to ground or rolling them off.

There is a fixed position tone control with a rotary switch on the market from Stellartone called Tone Styler.

[Primal]

Well, first off, resistors are measured in ohms, not farads. Capacitors are measured in farads.

As for the idea, its interesting, but it doesn't offer much versatility. Unless you are willing to customize and tweak the the values for specific guitars/pickups/etc, you may not have usable tones. In my opinion, you would be better off to have a single regular tone pot, and then a rotary switch to allow for the use of different tone caps.

[Sevara]

Well, first off, resistors are measured in ohms, not farads. Capacitors are measured in farads.

As for the idea, its interesting, but it doesn't offer much versatility. Unless you are willing to customize and tweak the the values for specific guitars/pickups/etc, you may not have usable tones. In my opinion, you would be better off to have a single regular tone pot, and then a rotary switch to allow for the use of different tone caps.

Ugh. Yeah, it's late at night, and I'm diving into the deep end, but thanks for the correct.

As for the product mentioned, it's both a little pricey, and a little overfeatured. I'm deliberately looking to narrow the options, to say, 3 or 5, and while blade switches would be a bit quicker, 1) who's going to be trying to switch tones that fast on the fly, and 2) I saw a custom guitar once with 5 rocker switches... that monster just wasn't pretty. So there is an aesthetic rationale for my argument; would you rather see 4 knobs and a blade switch, or would you rather see 2 knobs and 3 blade switches?

Edited August 8, 2006 by Sevara

[Sevara]

OK, well a more straightforward question about switching:

Say I set up an HSH guitar. I'm not too worried about coil-splitting, but I want to be able to hit exactly all the pickup combinations. So how would this work: having a 3-way toggle, with a bypass, H - H, and H S H settings, with the bypass trailing to a 5-way superswitch with Strat-style switching (1, 1+2, 2, 2+3, and 3)?

Should also mention that I'd want H - H and H S H to be parallel, and H S and S H to be in series.

Edited August 8, 2006 by Sevara