Sevara

OK, well a more straightforward question about switching:

Say I set up an HSH guitar. I'm not too worried about coil-splitting, but I want to be able to hit exactly all the pickup combinations. So how would this work: having a 3-way toggle, with a bypass, H - H, and H S H settings, with the bypass trailing to a 5-way superswitch with Strat-style switching (1, 1+2, 2, 2+3, and 3)?

Should also mention that I'd want H - H and H S H to be parallel, and H S and S H to be in series.

Well, first off, resistors are measured in ohms, not farads. Capacitors are measured in farads.

As for the idea, its interesting, but it doesn't offer much versatility. Unless you are willing to customize and tweak the the values for specific guitars/pickups/etc, you may not have usable tones. In my opinion, you would be better off to have a single regular tone pot, and then a rotary switch to allow for the use of different tone caps.

Ugh. Yeah, it's late at night, and I'm diving into the deep end, but thanks for the correct.

As for the product mentioned, it's both a little pricey, and a little overfeatured. I'm deliberately looking to narrow the options, to say, 3 or 5, and while blade switches would be a bit quicker, 1) who's going to be trying to switch tones that fast on the fly, and 2) I saw a custom guitar once with 5 rocker switches... that monster just wasn't pretty. So there is an aesthetic rationale for my argument; would you rather see 4 knobs and a blade switch, or would you rather see 2 knobs and 3 blade switches?

I'm working on a couple of designs, at the moment, and one of the ideas I've been toying around with is the idea of using rotary switches in place of pots for purposes of tone controls.

The idea:

The guitar has 2 tone switches, one for highs and one for lows. Both are 3-way rotary switches, with the equivalent of a standard pot set at 0, a pot set at 5, and a pot set at 10.

Now, it strikes me that the upsides to this would be that for a gigging guitar, you could have a much more consistent tone, considering the finicky nature of tone knobs, and also for a gigging guitar, the rotary switch having less contact surface would make it a longer time before you have to take the guitar apart and clean the guts to avoid those nasty "dirty pot pops."

However, as limited as my electronics knowledge is, it seems that the downside would be the wiring loop's cumbersome size- unless somebody here has a shortcut I might be missing, this approach would require 3 branches, with "fixed" resistors (say 250uF, 500uF, and 1000uF) for each closed loop. Anybody have any thoughts on this?

I'm a guy in the southern NJ area (near Philly), who's been playing for a while, and looking to get more involved with the whys and hows of guitars (got a mind to make a couple gimmicky ones ).

Sounds like I should have a blast here.