Wireless Pickup Switch

[Samuel McBrian-Brian]

Wow, I'm all for experimentation and all, but for God's sake, just wire up a freakin' blower switch already! You keep the main selector switch on the neck pickup, and when it comes time to switch on the distortion, you flick the big blower switch thus bypassing the selector and stomp on your overdrive. It's a lot better than trying to stomp on your distortion AND your bridge pickup at the same time.

Not if you incorporate your A/B stompbox into your pickup selecting stompbox. You could wire them up to the same switch, or have them side by side with the buttons having a large area. Two halves of circles almost touching at where they were bisected, so you could easily step on one or the other or both.

I'm very protective of my idea, and FatMike said he wants to use a foot pedal anyway.

[GregP]

I think the ideas connected to the stereo (TRS) cable gives you the best match of "typical non-weird" hardware and accomplishing your goals.

Er, except it wouldn't be wireless. <chuckle>

[crafty]

Not if you incorporate your A/B stompbox into your pickup selecting stompbox. You could wire them up to the same switch, or have them side by side with the buttons having a large area. Two halves of circles almost touching at where they were bisected, so you could easily step on one or the other or both.

I'm very protective of my idea, and FatMike said he wants to use a foot pedal anyway.

Well, he also said he wants the pedal to be wireless, so where's your diagrams for that?

Listen, we could get stuck in a battle royale over this moot point, but coming from a point of ease of use in performance, simplicity, and reliability, the blower switch is the better option. Running A/B boxes is a great idea if you're using piezo bridges to separate amps, several guitars, or true stereo setups, but for something like this it's just an unnecessary kludge.

[Samuel McBrian-Brian]

I thought he wanted wireless for lack of any better idea. The TRS idea makes it so you don't need wireless. It does achieve the function of stepping on the floor and changing the pickup. All that aside, yes, a blower switch would be much simpler.

You know what would be cool? Staggered pickups like on precision basses with the high strings through one channel and the low strings through the other, with a stereo setup. Yeah, that would be awesome stereo.

[Sambo]

If you want wireless, pop across to mouser. There's alot of chipsets that will do what you want. But, as with anything wireless... BATTERIES DIE! But whats the point when you have a wire to your guitar anyway?

S

[unklmickey]

...Listen, we could get stuck in a battle royale over this moot point, but coming from a point of ease of use in performance, simplicity, and reliability, the blower switch is the better option. Running A/B boxes is a great idea if you're using piezo bridges to separate amps, several guitars, or true stereo setups, but for something like this it's just an unnecessary kludge.

hi Crafty,

you might very well be right, but unless you know the exact intention of the person using something like this, it can be hard to say what is "best".

i think conversations that meander about like this one, offer a lot of fodder for the imagination, regardless of what ends up being the best way for the person asking the question.

cheers,

unk

[jnewman]

Here's an option that would work allowing you to use a stereo cable or a mono cable and still use all your pups.

Have the pickups' output still be switched and go to the tip of the stereo plug. Have the bridge pickup's output go directly to the ring. Have the sleeve for ground.

If you use a mono cable, you just get to switch between your two pickups with the switch. If you want to use your footpedal, set your switch to neck pickup, then you have neck on tip and bridge on ring.

With a strat, you could still have the same setup, and still have all the switching options when using mono, but the footpedal would only have the option of one pickup by itself (the bridge pickup in this example), and whatever other one you wanted to have the switch set to. I.E. a strat would have normal switching on the guitar with the footpedal bypassing directly to bridge pup or allowing the normal switching.

Edited January 30, 2007 by jnewman

[dh7892]

Very nice idea to have the switch going to the tip and your choice of pup going to the ring.

I've got an Ibanez and I tend to use either neck or bridge humbuckers for distortion stuff and the neck + middle out of phase for clean sounds. I can switch between neck and bridge very quickly but hitting the 4th position of the 5-way switch is a little harder if you're in a hurry.

I'm thinking of getting a Boss GT-Pro or GT-8 multi-effects and they have a neat feature where you can plug amp channel switching cables into them and use the effects box to select amp channels on a patch by patch basis. I could make an A/B box that switches based on making or breaking a connection, plug it into the GT and get it to specially choose the appropriate pups just for clean patches. All other patches could just use whatever I select from the switch.

[dh7892]

Oh yeah, I meant to say in my last post: is using a USB cable to carry analogue signal data a good idea? Is it screened? Aren't the connectors a bit loose for guitar use?