Draw your guitar wiring diagrams in DIYLC

[bancika]

Hi!

Disclaimer - DIYLC is totally free and even open source, so I'm not doing this for profit

I'm the creator of DIY Layout Creator app that is widely used in the DIY community to draw pedal and amp layouts and schematics. It's been around since 2006 and it is constantly evolving to cover more of what we do as DIY enthusiasts.

Few years ago I started an effort to extend DIYLC into a guitar wiring designer tool because there's no such thing as far as I know on the market. I usually receive comments from people who are using it for amps and pedals, but rarely for guitar wirings, so I just wanted to raise awareness that it's there.

It uses the same UI/UX for drawing guitar wirings as you would use to draw a pedal or amp circuit, but I made some tools dedicated to guitar wiring debugging and analyzing that were helpful to me in my builds. Hoping someone else might find them useful.

For example, I used it to draw this layout of my travelcaster guitar. Drawing in itself is simple and it involves dragging components from the toolbox to the canvas and connecting them with wires...but what's really cool is the new feature that can analyze what we draw and tell us how that wiring is going to work in real life.

From File > Analyze > Analyze Guitar Diagrams we can access the analyzer tool that can do the following:

• identifies all the switches in the diagram and analyzes how the circuit behaves in each of the combination of switch positions. For example, if we have a 3-way Les Paul switch and one push-pull potentiometer, the diagram will show six different switch combinations and would analyze all of them in detail
• in each switch position, it checks which of the pickup coils are activated,
• checks whether they are in split-coil mode or full humbucking (in case of humbucking pickups),
• checks if the coils are wired in series or parallel mode,
• checks the phase of each coil and in case there is more than one active coil, checks if the coils are in-phase or out-of-phase,
• checks if the current pickup combination is noise-cancelling or not,
• checks if any of the potentiometers are wired as volume or tone controls
• checks if there is a treble bleed network installed on a volume control

In the example above there are 6 different switch position combinations (3 of the LP switch times two of the coil splitter push/pull). One of the switch combinations for the diagram above would look something like this

Switch configuration: [Split.ON1:SW1.Middle]

Parallel/Series connectivity tree:

(((Rbleed + Cbleed) || Volume.1-2) + ((Bridge.North<- + Bridge.South<-) || (Neck.South<- + Neck.North<-))) ||
Volume.2-3

Notes:
'Neck' pickup wired in humbucking mode with series coils
'Bridge' pickup wired in humbucking mode with series coils
'Neck' and 'Bridge' pickups engaged, wired in parallel
This configuration is hum-cancelling
All pickup coils are wired in-phase
'Volume' potentiometer acts as a volume control for 'Neck' and 'Bridge'

In terms of component coverage - most of the commonly used components are already there - different single-sized pickps (including stacked and rail humbuckers), full-sized humbuckers, soapbars, slide switches, LP and toggle switches, pots, caps, etc. I'm still working on extending the component base to include some less common components.

If this sounds useful to you, head over to https://github.com/bancika/diy-layout-creator and grab your copy of DIYLC to play with. User manual is located here https://github.com/bancika/diy-layout-creator/blob/wiki/Manual.md

Cheers!

Edited April 1, 2022 by bancika

[mistermikev]

For the record... I use it and love it.  so thankful.  really appreciate the recent change towards backwards compatibility as now I don't need to have multiple generations of the software available.  you rawk.

[bancika]

Cool, thanks for the comment!

[mistermikev]

1 hour ago, bancika said:

Cool, thanks for the comment!

the analyzer: is a pretty cool feature.  Would love to test it out on the below... but (at least last I used) there really isn't a component for the stew mac/philli luthier 4p6t.  I just used an image.  Perhaps I'm daft and there is something there that I missed?  

4SingleCoils_4p6t_2Vol_3wayTog_v1.3.pdf

[bancika]

You are right, there are no rotary switches at the moment. They are in the queue with higher priority. Working on slide switches at the moment at rotary are next.

Also, as a note, schematic ground symbol does not come into play with guitar diagrams, analyzer will not figure it out. There should be a wire connecting ground points, like on my drawing in the original post.

[bancika]

You are right, there are no rotary switches at the moment. They are in the queue with higher priority. Working on slide switches at the moment at rotary are next.

Also, as a note, schematic ground symbol does not come into play with guitar diagrams, analyzer will not figure it out. There should be a wire connecting ground points, like on my drawing in the original post.

Also, you are using labels on short leads coming from pickups and then again  on short leads on the switch. This will not work, you need to have actual unbroken direct connection via a wire. I will consider adding a dedicated "label" connector or something that joins points with the same label together. That would make it possible to have drawing similar to yours.

[mistermikev]

4 hours ago, bancika said:

You are right, there are no rotary switches at the moment. They are in the queue with higher priority. Working on slide switches at the moment at rotary are next.

Also, as a note, schematic ground symbol does not come into play with guitar diagrams, analyzer will not figure it out. There should be a wire connecting ground points, like on my drawing in the original post.

Also, you are using labels on short leads coming from pickups and then again  on short leads on the switch. This will not work, you need to have actual unbroken direct connection via a wire. I will consider adding a dedicated "label" connector or something that joins points with the same label together. That would make it possible to have drawing similar to yours.

right on.  good to know.  this one is verified the old fashioned way at this point but I tend to do a lot of rotary switches so probably would come in handy (to know) in the future.  also very encouraged to know rotary switches are on your radar.  

fyi... something I learned the hard way - the philli luthier rotary works exactly backwards from the stew mac.  Just mentioning as that would be particularly relevant to making a rotary switch and any analysis it might perform!

I know a lot of folks use eagle... but I still use diylc for preamps/pedals.  Does everything I need and is indispensable for helping to organize wiring for guitar layouts.  Thank you again for what you do.  

very much appreciate you taking the time to respond.

[henrim]

I have used DIYLC quite a bit for drawing synth modules and guitar pedals. I hadn’t realized it has guitar wiring functionalities too. Have to try it out!

I have reported a few issues/wishes in GitHub and I have to say that it is a privilege to use a tool that when you report an issue you get a personal reply and the issue actually gets taken care of. No such thing with big software companies!

Thanks again for such a great tool!