3 pickups, coil taps, series, phase and piezo excess

[Dom]

Dane and I have been discussing various wiring ideas for this guitar off and on for a few months now. I wanted a stock look with no extra switches so 5 push pulls were the only way to go. I went back to 3 HB-1's now under toaster tops and no HiGain. I did try out 500k potentiometers and the out of phase mod individually for the neck & mid pickups in the last few months to see if I really was going to use them. Out of phase sounds great with these pickups and I will be using it a good deal on this and my other guitars too. I'd already done the piezo addition & I find it indispensable giving me a sound that is a cross between an acoustic and a resonator guitar. The coil taps I'd had set up on faders for years and will be much better on push pulls. In the end I decided to ditch the idea of series/parallel and stick with just parallel.

I haven't had nearly enough time to work on my guitar projects as I had forecasted so I recently asked Dane to create a new harness. It should be arriving tomorrow. I will have to solder it all in but here is a preview of the great job Dane did.



How will it work? For a 3 pickup guitar I like my volumes on top and my tones below so I can turn on/shut off pickups easily.
3 way switch works neck & bridge and they share a volume (top left) and tone (bottom left) with .01uf cap for "woman tone".
Middle pickup volume is top right and the mid tone with a darker .022 cap is on bottom right.
What used to be the blend is the piezo volume.

Now the push pulls: The coil taps will be up top on the volumes. Upper left is neck upper right is middle and the blend is the bridge. Pull for single coil.
The two push pulls below on the tone knobs will be neck out of phase bottom left and the middle on the bottom right. That gives me every combo of pickup out of phase with another. Bridge out o phase with neck & middle happens when you pull up both.

One more thing, I opted for 2 stereo jacks. Standard will have the pickups on the tip and piezo on the ring and the rick-o-sound jack will be flopped so if I use mono cords then I can still get the different sounds out of the two jacks.

More tomorrow once I get it in and wired up. I can't wait to get all these tones on one guitar. Cheers!

[Dom]

The harness is installed and works like a charm! If only my neck pickup did. I have one on order. But in the meantime with a HiGain back and in the bridge position I am getting all kinds of useful tones one would not expect from a Ric. I can't wait for this to be done for real.

Back in 1997 before the internet was useful, I took this guitar to a local guitar shop and based on the owner's claims of being the former no. 2 at Seymour Duncan pickups and his claim (pictures) to have modified Pete Townshend's numbered Les Paul's, I had them install a middle pickup and switched to 3 HB1's with coil faders, his idea. Within a year or so the mid pickup stopped working. I took it back and he bad mouthed the guitar and Rics. In a bind, I reluctantly let him "fix" it and when it was done the neck fader then "worked" backwards and now I see that clearly they screwed it up. Another year later and the bridge went kaput. Coil faders may have been an issue but I've always blamed the shop for a poor wiring job. Sometimes pedigree just means a dog.

This harness with the proper rated pots has unleashed a monster and it isn't even done yet...

[Dom]

I played the rewired 370 with the band on Saturday and the other guys were very impressed. With the out of phase mods (OOP) It cut through like a hot knife through butter. I play with a drummer and a bassist who has morphed into a keyboard & computer electronics bass player. Being the only guitar and only stringed instrument in our band I have a lot of tonal ground to cover & plenty of room to stretch out.

I have that temporary HiGain in the bridge and that leads to phase issues with the HB1's. I can circumvent this the phase pulls when the bridge is used with just the neck or just the bridge & mid pickup but with all 3 on there is no avoiding one being out of phase*. That said I still put the guitar through the paces. Here are my preliminary H-H-S findings. I spent most of the time with the neck & mid on or all three & I did not use the piezo. I play an Orange AD30 through a Marshall 10 inch cab iso'd and mic'd front and back to the PA with flat EQ. The following two paragraphs are all with respective volume controls dimed.

Notable tones with neck or mid as humbuckers: for solos the neck & mid OOP gives the Brian May tone and the neck & bridge OOP nails the snarky Jimmy Page tone. Mid humbucker by itself was not possible with my former wiring scheme and I found on its own I get a nice wide fat all purpose sound that is good across the board. I swear the mid pickup is in a sweet spot. Neck HB alone is much darker by comparison.

Tapped tones. Neck & mid together & both tapped is hum canceling. This tone is a jewel, like a strat but not as thin & with higher output. OOP one of those pickups and you have quack-spank. *With all three on & both neck & mid tapped you get a hum canceling telecaster bridge tone. I don't know why & by all means you shouldn't but that is the sound. My guess is it is due to the neck pu currently being out of phase with the bridge & mid. Then go humbucker on the neck & that turns into the tele in between sound but introduces some hum.

Now, I have spent years looking up 3 humbucker guitars. I've played several since building my own with a 5 way & taps in 1995 then the faulted wiring on this guitar since 1997. Three humbucker guitars are not at all popular & most think the only benefit is visual. The real issue is getting the switching right. On any 3 pickup guitar two 3ways would do it. WIre up one for neck & mid and feed that output to another shared with just the bridge. Now you have 7 pickup combos and instant access to the bridge pickup alone. Most don't want to add a switch to a Paul or SG. I too didn't want to add a switch and that restriction of using a volume for the neck turned into an unintended benefit with the wiring that Dane did. By having a shared volume for neck & bridge I can use the mid pickup volume as a variable EQ. If I OOP the mid I can use it as a presence control.

The tone knobs were initially supposed to work differently than they do and now I'm glad they don't. Initially .010 tone cap for neck & bridge for Clapton Woman tone and .022 cap on just the mid for a darker sound. The tones are jumpered and the .010 feeds into the .022 so in actuality they are not separate. However the benefit is I have two completely different tones which I can use on any pickup. I can get jazzy glassy smoothness with the .022 on the neck or the woman tone or I can get an angry, dirty Hound Dog Taylor tone with the .010 on the neck & mid. Working the .022 back & forth gives me the wha-wha effect I usually get by manipulating the blend knob on my stock 330 between pickups with the neck tone rolled down.

I still have to get the correct bridge pickup and rewire the jacks back to mono so the piezo is completely separate. But my initial reaction thus far is that I've never seen this much control of tone on any passive guitar. It does everything. Mucho kudos to Dane who racked his brain trying to figure out how to make this guitar excess possible then delivered.

[kennyhowes]

Y'all keep track of the way it was done, in case anyone else wants to try it!

[aceonbass]

This was a very tricky and complicated setup that took more time thinking about and researching than actually doing. Searching several websites on wiring schemes, there was nothing EXACTLY like this to work from, so....I improvised. Giving the Piezo it's own volume control (the 5th knob) and channel was easy, but that meant the rest of the guitar (3 HBs with all their switching mods and 2 different value tone caps) had to be on one channel, and that's where the jumper Dom is talking about comes in. It's pretty much the same way any mono RIC guitar's volume controls are bridged before the output jack, but because of the 2 different value tone caps, which had to be wired off of the tone pots (ala Fender), and the way one cap was shared by two pickups, the jumper had to be between of the tone pots, and this is why the tone controls aren't isolated and why they interact with each other. A compromise, but apparently not a problem here. Dom, if you want to completely isolate the channels, you can do so with the existing stereo jacks. You'll just need to unsolder the Piezo's output wire from the first stereo jack, solder it to the second stereo jack, and unsolder all connections between the two. The unused sleeve contact in the stereo jacks will act as kind of a tensioner to keep the cable tip from wiggling around as much when it's plugged in.

[Dom]

I switched back to the original 3way and went back to the mono jacks. The piezo with the pickups tapped and OOP is great for Frank Zappa's "Watermelon in Easter Hay" which is a tone I've been trying to nail for years. I'll try to record that and some other stuff on Thursday. The only thing left to shape my sound is a treble booster. Likely going to build one once I find a circuit design that does what I want. I got the Brian May tone with a digitech bad monkey but the hiss was unbearable.

I've decided that the OOP with 3 pickups is so versatile that I will be modding my red 350 with them too. I'm investigating if it is possible to do that and series/parallel push pulls in place of the taps used on the 370WB. The red 350 is going to be more about being a lead guitar. I'll pick the best ideas from the 370 and the 350 and then choose either HiGains or HB-1's or a combo of both for my project 350. Probably a piezo on that one too.

[aceonbass]

I've decided that the OOP with 3 pickups is so versatile that I will be modding my red 350 with them too. I'm investigating if it is possible to do that and series/parallel push pulls in place of the taps used on the 370WB.

Dom....It is possible to use a push-pull pot to do this. In would be series (stock) when in, and parallel when pulled..

[Dom]

3 'buckers in a row makes it go! I installed the final HB-1 in the bridge position late last night and found I needed to swap the red & blue leads to the middle pickup phase switch. Voila, no phase issues and everything works as intended. I am very impressed at the tonal variety of this setup. HB mode is meaty and wide and the single coil tones on any combination are excellent, which is not something I could say about any tapped full size humbuckers I've used in the past. As I said earlier it isn't as thin as a strat and has more bite.

I found out that I can get a uni-vibe sound by having the middle pickup OOP and rolling the mid volume on & off when in combination with the other pickups.

I'll get a picture of the completed wiring and post it. There is no room left in there for anything else I can tell you that! I honestly can't imagine needing anything else. The possibities of this wiring are simply endless.

[Dom]

Those are three HB-1's hidden under the toaster tops. Looks like stock controls, however...

These are all 500k push pull potentiometers

Coil taps up, neck, middle and bridge on the blend.

Neck and middle out of phase pulled up. With both pulled up the bridge is out of phase with the other two.

4.5 Rickenbackers...with some floor spaghetti.

[aceonbass]

Dominic....Since I didn't have the guitar here when I made that harness, I have no idea what all he different combinations sound like. You've gotta post a YouTube video of you demoing it.

[Dom]

Dominic....Since I didn't have the guitar here when I made that harness, I have no idea what all he different combinations sound like. You've gotta post a YouTube video of you demoing it.

I'm putting together a new iso box so I can record & demo with the right drive & without waking the kids...might be a couple days. My camera doesn't want to upload sound for some reason so I have to record it all into Logic then sync it.

[bdawson7]

That looks fantastic!!

Can you post a wiring diagram?