Help A Newb With Wiring

[Lefty]

http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y136/PLeftyC/PicMod.jpg

What am I doing wrong? The pickup buzzes really bad. I know I'm supposed to attach the ground connections to the pot but the sound shuts off. Green and white are soldered together, it's just hard to tell in the pic.

I really don't know much about the pickup except japan-made, maybe epiphone, and could be old as 80's.

[GregP]

None of the ground are touching other ground? Is the lug for the ground wiper on the pot (with the blue wire on) desoldered from the pot casing? Not that it strictly needs to be, but because I don't completely understand how current works, I just slavishly isolate absolutely everything... so if you haven't already done so, I would unbend the lug from the casing (desoldering first, of course), and then send a wire from that lug to the ground (as per your blue wire) and add an additional wire from the pot casing to ground. Take care not to let any of those grounds touch each other or other conductive material though could potentially create a continuous cycle.

Another possibility is that the wires don't match up the way you thought they did. Different companies use different wire colouring schemes. I STILL don't know what my Yamaha wires are, exactly, I just mucked around until it worked.

And yet another possibility is simply defective parts, most likely the pot.

Sorry that wasn't more helpful. Hard to know exactly what's going on there.

[curtisa]

Hard to see in that picture, it's a little bit blurry, but is the black wire from the pickup connected to the ground point you've made?

The only other thing I can think of is that you have the two connections to the jack socket back to front, again can't really see in that picture...

...in fact, after thinking about it a bit, given the symptoms you describe about buzzing and the loss of signal when you ground the pot, I'd say that's exactly what's wrong. Check the wiring of the jack socket.

[Lefty]

Well I tried swapping the two wires going to the jack. It didn't help.

The black and ground are connected. The red goes to the pot and the white and green are connected.

The guy who sold it to me said it has the ability to switch to single-coil so maybe I have the single coil on and that is the buzzing.

[Acousticraft]

You may need to unsolder the pickup wires and do some testing with an ohm meter to work out the ground, humbucker and coil cut circuit wires. I would imagine the red but I'm only guessing, is probably the humbucker circuit and the white/ green are coil cut options. The humbucker circuit will give the highest reading and the coil cut about half of that reading.

Have you tried googling to see if you can find a wiring diagram. I just found something that may help.

http://www.gibson.com/Gear_News.aspx?Alias...up%20the%20Pace

[Lefty]

The diagram told me to attach a wire from the bridge to the ground. I read at another site that I could get electrocuted from doing that. What should I do?

[Acousticraft]

If you dont have a ground from the bridge to a pot casing or whereever your ground is, you will have buzzes etc that will probably go away when you touch the strings because you become the ground. As far as being electrocuted you would need a major short circuit in an amplifier to get shocked so all the more reason for your strings to be well grounded.

[Southpa]

Here are wire color codes for some well known pickups.

http://guitarelectronics.zoovy.com/categor...ckupcolorcodes/

If you aren't sure then you have to measure the DC resistance to get it straight. One wire is the hot for the entire HB, 2 others are for each single coil that comprise the HB and then there are the ground(s). Generally the hot HB DC resistance reading (measured by contacting between the wire and the ground wire with meter set at 10KΩ) should be double that of each of the two single coil wires (also measured between the wire and ground). If you want to use just the HB then the other 2 wires are connected and taped off. If you want some single coil action out of the pickup you generally have to employ a separate DPDT (double pole / double throw) switch by connecting the single coil wires up. There are also 3 wire pickups where the odd wire is just used to control one of the single coils. You have the option to control both single coils but its generally an option thats not used much.

The vol pot should be gounded to itself. Push the right side lug against the pot case and solder it down. Get rid of the blue wire and solder both ground leads AND your output jack ground wire AND your bridge ground wire AND your pickup selector switch ground wire AND ground wires for additional pickups to the vol. pot casing. If you are using additional volume and tone pots then bridge their respective pot casings in a line ending at the main "star" volume pot casing as well as soldering those tabs to their respective casings. Thats the standard way to set up a grounding system with the (a) volume pot casing as the central ground point. No loops, etc. can occur and things should work right from the get go barring any component defects.

[Lefty]

Thanks guys.