JoeAArthur

Really? I could put one of those to use... do you have a link?

+2 Fleetdogs approach complicates wiring for stage simplicity. He can preset his tapping preference. As an example, he can move from bridge full, to both split, to neck full just by using his pickup selector. Mammoths approach simplifies guitar wiring for stage complexity. Using the same example as above, three switches would need to be flipped each time to move from bridge full, to both split, to neck full. Everything has trade-offs.

The commons should not be wired together if you are going to use Robert's diagram. You might also note if the common lugs are in the same place as Robert's diagram assumes. They might be opposite depending on which switch you are using.

From the guitarfetish website: "It's wired with four conductors, so just add a push-pull pot and you can instantly go from humbucker to single coil without adding any holes to your prized Tele" I guess I can see where it might be interpreted as a need rather than an option.

Instead of thinking of a pot as a variable resistance... think about variable resistance providing a variable voltage. Voltage control? Sure, been used in synthesizer circuits for decades. Simple to convert voltage to a digital signal.

I don't get it, are you trying to cut me down or something? Or for some strange reason do you think all -good- tube amps hum like theirs no tomorrow? If I did buy one of those, I would do mods to get rid of the noise. (do a search on google for valve junior mods) Would you do mods on a mini-z to get rid of the noise? The epi head has a DC filiment supply. I don't see that in the picture of the mini-z... but it might. I sure hope so because the filiment wires are not twisted as is normal practice with AC heater supplies. The mini-z appears to be using carbon comp resistors in the signal path. Guess what the noisy-est resistors happen to be? The epi is more likely to be using at least carbon film and might even be using metal film since the prices are much cheaper now - both of which will be less noisy than carbon comp. Carbon comp has a hype factor going for them and that's about it. But personally, I don't think that is what Crafty meant by "noisy".

Yes, much easier to send the pickup wires to the control cavity first. If I counted correctly... I count 6 wires (and of course at least 1 ground) - 3 wires each per pickup... that would be routed to the tap switches. This seems to match up with what you said. Before you start mounting pickups whip out the VOM and measure the continuity of all 4 coils. The pickup I received last week had an open coil so now I am waiting on a replacement. You don't want to find out something like this after you have everything wired up. While you're at it... and I just took your word for it before... verify that the polarity of what will be your outside coils is as you expect. After I thought about it, it seems a bit unusual for the outside coils to be of opposite polarity for "normal" humbuckers.

I agree with the others about "her tying my shoes". Boring, too repetitive. The guitar rhythm sounds to fizzy fuzzy and gets lost at times in the mix. The lead breaks... well, I can't tell if the guitar is off time or if it is the drummer but whatever it would be much better if it could be tightened up. Overall, sounds like a "backing track"... missing something. "taking sides". It has more variety. Less of the fizzy fuzzy rhythm. You really should listen to those parts - pay attention to how the cleaner bass pops through the mix and the rhythm is too much strumming as if the fizzy sound is supposed to fill the holes. This would be like the section that starts 00:24. Reducing that drive control with less frantic strumming and more of a rhythmic pattern would help. The section that starts at 01:59 with the clean sound on the guitar shows how it can cut through better. Not filling the holes would make it more interesting. "why aren't you smil...". This is the best of the bunch. Actually pretty good. Still a touch too much fuzz but it works better without the frantic strumming.

No, no reason at all, assuming of course that the power transformer heater supply winding can handle the total heater current of whatever octal type tube you might want to stick in. After all, why limit yourself to a 6V6. But if you're going to go this far, might as well splurge for a decent heavy duty switch to determine which socket's cathode resistor you want grounded. Without the cathode resistor tied to ground there will be no current flow through the tube. Selection via a switch is much easier than having to plug and unplug two tubes when you want to change.

!!!!!!!

There are multiple AX84 designs. The closest one to a mini-z would be the P1 - if you leave off the tone controls. You might want to ask this question over at the AX84 forum.

This is kind of like that joke... right? You know the one, where you go to the doctor and say "doc, it hurts when I do this" and the doctor responds "then don't do that!!" Nope, never heard that you shouldn't install treble bleed caps in a dual volume control guitar. Can't think of any reason why you can't or why dual volumes should give more of a treble boost when turned down compared to a single volume. I have many guitars with treble bleeds, both dual volumes wired interactive as well as non-interactive. Treble bleed cap values will always be a compromise. It's simple equalization exercise - give a treble boost so that when something else takes it away the response will be flat. In order to be flat, the boost has to be equal to the cut - otherwise you have too much of one not enough of the other. By the way, the treble cut you are trying to equalize out comes from cable capacitance. Change cables and things might not work as well as they did. The boosting action CAN be controlled by the value of the cap. If you get too much boost then reduce the value of the cap so that the boost starts at a higher frequency. With 500K pots it does help to reduce the value of the cap... something like 500-680 pico seems to work well. I usually use a .001 micro with 250K pots.

Surgical tubing can be used instead of springs, but if the screw it too small for the pickup base where it is supposed to screw into... it won't help much to replace the springs with surgical tubing. Buying new screws of the correct size would be the correct option if you have no other reason to keep the others as you said. I did have to keep smaller screws once - simply because they were slotted head and not phillips. I used small nuts. Screw through the pickguard. Put on spring/tubing. Screw through pickup mounting. Screwed on nut. It works, but you cannot adjust pickup height simply by turning the screws. You have to remove pickguard and hold the nut. Once you get them adjusted... not a problem.

Didn't your pickups come with new mounting screws that are the appropriate size? I just got a new Tele bridge pickup from GFS and it came with screws and springs. All of the GFS pickups I have received do. Or are these pickups the budget ones that GuitarFetish sells? If so then they are not GFS pickups. Or do you need to use the old screws for some other reason?

A pot can over time build up enough crud to prevent the slider from making contact with the resistive strip. This can cause buzzing because your amp lead is essentially open - like having the amp on and the cord not plugged into a guitar. Of course if this was happening you wouldn't get much sound if any out of the guitar. It's easy to check by placing an aligator clip lead between the two non-grounded terminals of the pot with the pot fully on or clockwise. If you get an increase in volume then you probably should replace the pot. You haven't mentioned a string ground or if the noise gets lower when you touch the strings. I have found that some LP variants don't have them. If yours doesn't I suggest installing one. If your guitar is shielded check the ground for it, and if not you might think about installing that also. You might also check the quality of your guitar cord. Inexpensive and less shielded cable can introduce a lot of noise into your system.

Speakers are not very efficient machines. Most of the power they receive is converted to heat and not the movement of the cone which creates sound. This heat has to be eliminated and one thing that helps a great deal is the airflow caused by the movement of the speaker itself. You may have noticed vents in the back of the magnet structure. Let's say the power amp is of the dual polarity type, the kind that doesn't use an electrolytic capacitor between the output transistors and speaker load. Let's also say one output transistor decides to give up the ghost and shorts across its emitter and collector. This would be like placing the B+ voltage of a tube amp directly across the speaker. When the DC voltage hits the speaker it will be slammed fully forward or backward and it will stay there. Without air movement the heat created by the unrelenting power supply current will quickly build up and eventually the flash point of some material like the paper cone will be reached and it will burst into flame.

You're more than welcome, Fleetdog. Hey... don't forget the pics!! I wanna see how you routed the wiring! Good luck!

Ok... I see. Good diagram. I like it because you don't have to run as many wires to or from the coil tap switch plate. Hmmm.... If you use what I said about the order of the coils not making a difference and combined that with your schematic, then this would be possible: By not having to wire the bridge differently from the neck just to select the desired bridge coil with the tap switch, then the bridge coil that could always be hanging from one end is eliminated. And by connecting the unused position of the pickup selector to the output, the hanging unused coils are shorted to themselves when they are not needed. NO hanging coils and no possibility of interference from them. And if I counted correctly, one less wire to route to the tap selector switches... because there is no longer any need for an output wire connection to tap the desired coil on the bridge pickup.

Your diagram is correct. Good Job!! For each pickup, the red and white wires for that pickup connect to themselves. Twist, solder and tape. When these wires are connected this way it places the coils in the humbucker pickup in series, and this connection is sometimes called the "series link". In two wire humbuckers, these wires are connected together inside the pickup. In 4-wire humbuckers they are made available outside the pickup to allow for other wiring configurations - such as using a switch to change the coil configuration between series and parallel, or for coil tapping, or both.

It's a homebrew.

I don't understand. Your tone control is already wired correctly to the volume control as per your diagram. Which remaining switch lug? You should have 3 lugs on the switch. One pickup green wire soldered to one outside lug of the switch, the other pickup green wire soldered to the other outside lug, and the center switch lug connected to the loose white wire on your volume control. If you have more than 3 lugs on the switch, then you are going to have to tell how they are arranged because I can't tell from your diagram.

You need to look at the pickup where the wires are attached. On the top side you will be able to make out the thin coil wires comming from an eyelet connection to the external wires. If you have two then you have a typical single coil. If there are three, then you have a tapped single coil. Phase will matter when used in conjunction with any pickup, especially a problem when there are two different makers involved.

Most Les Pauls and SGs and 335 types are wired so that the volume controls are interactive - turning down one completely cuts off the other. There is a slightly different sound and not really a total loss of mixing capability with the interactive wiring. If you think about how the guitar is wired now, you can see that turning down the non-interactive volume pot also loads the pickup down as the volume is reduced - even with single pickup selection. The interactive wiring can stay brighter longer. Plus, if you use treble bypass caps on the volume controls, when both pickups are selected and you turn one down you are placing the bypass cap for one across the signal line for the other with the non-interactive wiring. It would be best to ask as it really amounts to preference.

I would do a blend pot as thegarhanman suggested... but if you're going to stick with dual volume controls take a look at the wiring for a jazz bass for how the volume controls are connected. http://www.seymourduncan.com/support/schem.../jazz_bass.html

While I could get the single pickup selections to work by grounding the series link and knowing that pickup was selected, I couldn't get it to work for the both pickup position since I needed both poles for the pickup selection and had none left over for a ground reference for that selector position. Unorthodox or not I'd love to see how you resolved this and kept all three split selectors isolated... so don't forget to post!! One benefit of schematics is that they have no assumptions unless labeled, and since you didn't specify splitting any particular coil I didn't assume. That would be a decision made at wiring time for me. Your assumption on the other hand is that a specific polarity of coil needs to be connected to ground. Not true. If you follow the manufacturer's normal wiring recommendation than that is what you might wind up with. For example... Duncan says to connect the red and white wires together for the series link, take the hot output from the black wire and ground the green. This will place the south coil closest to ground. However, if you connect the black to the green for the series link, take the hot from the red and ground the white, you'll now have the north coil closest to ground. The pickup will be in the same phase with no difference in sound because of the opposite coil connection. A series connection is a series connection regardless of the physical ordering of it's parts.