Hooya

Woah. Well, that would be interesting. We'd still suffer from effectively one volume control, right? And even if not, we'd still get the volume drop from the other pickups when the active one is engaged. At any rate, yeah, I don't think that exists. But two of these: http://www.guitarelectronics.com/product/CPCS55/CTS-Stacked-Dual-Concentric-Audio-Pot-500K500K.html And one of these: http://www.billsmusiconline.com/a25kx2.html Would get me where I want I think. Maybe. I'm concerned that the degradation in sound quality of the passive pickups when connected to the low value pots will be worse than the "switch-like" behavior of the high value pots with the active pickup. EMG makes a preamp for passive pickups that will get them to work right with low value pots, but it's another mini toggle switch, and $60... No fun. The more I discover about this the more I think I don't want to go this far with my re-wire. I will probably end up just wiring my second tone control to my bridge pickup, putting a treble bleed mod in, and just have no tone control on the EMG. We'll see. I'll play it as it is a little while longer and see how I feel about it. The other thought is to wire up my pups on the switch so position 3 is for the bridge pickup, that way I can use one or two passive pickups together, and the only combination of passive and active is position 4, which would be the bridge and middle. Position 5 would be the active pickup alone. Might lead to some interesting sounds, which is what I'm clearly in to. Neck Neck and Bridge Bridge Bridge and Middle (active) Middle With that setup and all dual concentric knobs (with low value pots for the Middle pup) I could probably be happy.

Hmm. That's because the wiring you gave me is series wiring? What about doing parallel? Any way to do that? I'm OK with getting a new 5 position switch if needed at this point.

Hmm... That kinda sucks. Or maybe not! So the best option would be three stacked pots, is what you're saying. Independent volume and tone for each without needing more than three holes in the guard. I'd really like to maintain the general look of the guitar, just want more control.

No, not at all. You can wire up EMG pickups just like every other pickup you have in a guitar, you just have to use high impedance (250k-500k) value pots for tone and volume to. They don't work quite right though - they're to accommodate for the passive pickups but ideally the EMG should have 25k value pots for tone and volume and a .1mF cap for tone). But on my guitar as it is now, you could drop in a regular passive pickup directly in place without changing the wiring at all except for the battery line for the EMG and it would be absolutely typical Strat wiring. And the EMG works just fine, but the tone control is basically on or off, no gentle rolloff, so I want independent control of it, and have a tone control on my bridge pickup as well.

Thank you! This is really close to what I want I do want separate tone and volume controls for the active pickup, and "master" volume and tone for the passive. So if you were to eliminate the upper right volume and tone pots there, what would it look like? I will be using three total knobs, but one will be a double pot, concentric ones, for the middle pup. So effectively I will have four pots, but only three holes in my pickup guard. I'm really confused by the graphic of the switch. Is that like if I just looked at the profile and every other one was on one side versus the other? Refer to my first post to see what I mean... Realizing the switch will go directly to the output wasn't something I thought of. That must solve my dilema.

I have a Strat with a weird pickup configuration that I like but I'd like to be able to get more out of it. It's currently wired normally (1 master volume, 2 tone controls for Neck and Middle) with the following pickups: Neck: Standard Strat neck pickup Middle: Active EMG pickup Bridge: Specialty pickup ... can't recall the brand at the moment as I don't have the guitar in front of me, some signature series pup from the 90's. Using the wiring as shown here: http://static.zoovy.com/img/guitarelectronics/W575-H550-Bffffff/W/wd3sss5l12_000.jpg I want to leave the pickups in the positions they're in, and I want the 5 positions switch to operate as normal. However I want to change how the knobs work. I want to wire so that the Neck and Bridge pickups are controlled by one master volume and one master tone control. The Middle Pickup will be controlled by a double-knob pot, having its own volume and tone control. I do NOT want the middle pickup volume to bypass the switch configuration, so if the selector switch is on Neck pickup only the middle pup shouldn't ever be able to be heard regardless of its volume position. Is it possible to do what I want with a standard 5 position selector switch? The biggest issue I can see is that I can't run the middle pickup through the master volume, I want it controlled totally independently from the other pickups, but still only active when the switch is in one of the middle three positions. Any thoughts?