How do you wire 2 humbuckers with separate volumes?

  • Thread starter Thread starter HollowMan1975
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HollowMan1975

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This is driving me nuts! I have a degree in Engineering and for the life of me I cannot figure it out.

I have 2 humbuckers and two 500k rotary pots. I am trying to wire them so that each pot controls one of the humbuckers. So if you turn them both up, you get both humbuckers, and if you turn one down, you get sound from the opposite onely. The only way to get "no sound" would be to turn them both down to zero.

When I wired it up like this: http://www5.ocn.ne.jp/~dgb/index_e.htm (see diagram 2H57, about half of the way down), if either pot is turned down, you get no sound out of either pickup! This makes sense, since the pots are wired in parallel with the output jack, if the current can't short through one of the pots, it simply jumps over and shorts through the other one. I simply want 2 PU's with separate volume controls with no tone knob.

Does anyone know how to do this?
 
Hi Middleman, I think the schematic you gave me is the same as the one I posted a link to. I tried the 2H57 schematic on the webpage I'd mentioned. To get to it, you have to click on the 2H wiring link in the frame.

The problem with this one is that if either pot is turned down, you get no sound at all, because the current simply shorts over the opposite pot, and not necessarily its own (because they're hooked in parallel). So in effect you actually get separate volume controls for each pickup, you get "parallel stacked volume controls" for a humbucker pair.
 
HollowMan1975 said:
The problem with this one is that if either pot is turned down, you get no sound at all, because the current simply shorts over the opposite pot, and not necessarily its own (because they're hooked in parallel). So in effect you actually get separate volume controls for each pickup, you get "parallel stacked volume controls" for a humbucker pair.
Click to expand...
That's the standard way for the wiring of twin humbuckers to work. If you want the sound from just one pickup or the other, that's when you use the pickup selector switch :D . If you want just the bridge pickup, then select only the bridge pickup, same with the neck pickup. If you want both, then select the parallel position and play with the volumes to get the sound you want. I'm not entirely sure they can even be wired to do what you described.
 
Yup, I'm slowly beginning to realize I pretty much have to drill another hole in my pickguard and add the selector switch.
 
That's what I was thinking you may be trying to do. Yeah, as far as I have ever known you need some kind of selector switch in there to get it to act right.

H2H
 
And aside from needing it, it will make your guitar so much more versatile in sound. On my guitar, I pretty much just leave the controls where they are at (bridge volume high, neck volume low, tone wide open) and just switch pickups for the different parts of a song. A general layout would be verses get the neck pickup, choruses get both for a really thick and wide sound, and then bridges and leads get the bridge pickup for a nice cutting sound.
 
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