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Hi guys,

I'm brand new to the forum, and was hoping that someone might be kind enough to help me design the wiring for my custom build solid body electric. I'm pretty good at soldering etc, but when it comes to designing the electrics, some assistance would be very helpful indeed.

It may be that someone could point me towards an existing guitar with similar electrics, but anyway.. here are the requirements I have in my mind..

The guitar is to have two pickups, a humbucker in the bridge (available with either two or four wires.. whichever is more appropriate), a Strat type single coil in the neck.. there will be four controls plus a pickup selector, comprising of a master volume, a tone control for each pickup, a blender pot to fade from one pickup to the other whilst both pickups are selected, and a three way Switchcraft toggle selector. The selector will be simply wired for 'neck' in position one, 'neck & bridge' in position two, and 'bridge' in three.. the pots will likely be CTS.

The guitar will have a Tele style jack plug, and a fixed bridge which will also need earthing. I was also planning on adding a treble bleed to the circuit if possible.

Well I think that pretty much sums up what I have in my head as far as the wiring goes.. I'd be extremely grateful of any assistance, either to help me figure out the wiring from scratch, or to point me towards an existing guitar with similar electrics.. either would be very much appreciated.

Thank you for taking the time to read through my post

Russ

I am not very much in electrics, but there are lots of differents wiring options on this site: http://guitarelectronics.com/guitar-wir ... -diagrams/

Seymour Duncan's site has good wiring diagrams. Make sure to follow the wire colors denoted by the pickup manufacturer, there is no standard on wire colors.

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wah
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Wah

Here is a humbucker, single coil, one volume and two tone

http://guitarelectronics.com/content/WDHS3T12_00.pdf

You could replace the switch with a blend pot but I don't see an easy way to have both

I could see a way to do this with a Tele-style 3-way, but you wouldn't be able to do this with a standard Gibson-style toggle, or not without the middle blend pot settings overriding the volume in neck or bridge position.

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Eschew obfuscation, espouse elucidation.

It seems you're set on what you want but I thought you may enjoy checking out some options since you are in the "designing" stage.

https://www.premierguitar.com/articles/21112-three-must-try-guitar-wiring-mods?page=1


Personally I'd go for the "Nashville wiring" considering the blender.

You may want to check out http://www.tdpri.com/threads/brent-masons-blend-knob-wiring-diagram.476407/ too- if you haven't.

Thanks to you all for all of the helpful replies.. the wiring is still very much in the design stage at the moment, and so I'm still open to all ideas.. it's looking as though wiring the guitar as I'd hoped is going to be a little more complicated than I imagined.. but after taking a look at some of the suggested wirings within those links.. hopefully I'll be able find something to suit.

Thanks once again.. I'm sure that I'll have some more questions to ask pretty soon, haha

Russ

I'll be interested to see how you work out the blend plus switch. Don't forget to use a linear pot for the blend - volume and tone controls are usually log or "audio taper". There is also the minor issue that most 'buckers like 500K pots and 0.022uF caps for the tone, single coils like 250K and 0.047uF.

http://www.stewmac.com/How-To/Online_Re ... iring.html

I would agree with linear being much more useful for blending (I've even gone so far as using reverse audio for a particular client who wanted more detail in the upper range of rotation). For a single blend pot, I'd use an M/N taper will give linear taper each side of center.

I was also going to suggest that since this would only be used to adjust the blend in center position, to set it up as non-grounding, only separating each side from output without grounding the relative pickups out when rolled back. This can spread the effective adjustment range even further, and still get you probably at least 90/10 to either side in the middle position. Since you'd still have the switch to get either pickup fully on it's own, this seems like it would be more useful.

Again though, you'd need a different kind of switch than a standard LP style switchcraft. A Tele-style 3-way would work for this, or you could make one to work out of parts from two 3-pickup switchcraft toggles, and I'm sure there are other toggles that would do the job, but it may take a bit of searching.

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Eschew obfuscation, espouse elucidation.

You state you will use CTS pots, then you know you don't get much volume until they are half way to 3/4 up and on, I used some and did not know this so had to get some ALPHA instead as you have volume from the start, 0 to 1 and on.