please help me find the best pickup wiring for this setup.

[TamirE]

I have an Ibanez S470.
I also have the pickups - seymour duncan JB-4 (humbucker), cool rails (dual rail single, actually a humbucker), fender lace sensor gold and fender lace sensor blue.
What I have in mind is using the JB-4 for the bridge, cool rails in the middle and the two lace sensors as two singles somehow fitted into the neck humbucker cavity.
i want to install 2 "DPDT on-on-on" mini-switches, one for the cool rails to make the choice of series/split/parallel possible, and one for the two lace sensors, hopefully doing the same. i'm not sure how it will work with the lace sensors because when using usual pickups you must have one of them reverse wound and with reverse polarity... can anybody here help me with this?

also, should i do a humbucker split in the bridge+middle position too? right now there is a split (the current configuration is JB4-FLSGold-FLSBlue, the FLSblue is a single in a humbucker cavity, which looks bad and sometimes picks up feedbacks from the bass amp....).

Please help. my guitar should be back from fret grind&polish + setup in a few days... i want to decide and write down the schematics untill then hopefully...

thanks in advance,
TamirE.

 

[Phyl]

Wow...

It sounds like a pretty neat project but I got a headache just trying to visualize the wiring challenges in my head.

If I understand your post correctly you basically want a HUM-HUM-HUM guitar with extra switches inserted to:

1) tap the bridge PU

2) tap the middle PU and select the phasing

3) wire the two neck pickups so they can act as a humbucker and control the phasing.

Maybe the best place to start is to decide how many volume and tone pots will you have. If you stick with one of the standard configurations like 2 volume, 2 tone you can down load a generic schematic from a lot of places and use that as starting point for your wiring. If you have a rudimentary understanding of guitar electronics it should be pretty apparent looking at the schematic where to stick the extra switches you need. Using volume and tone pots that double as pull-out switches will decrease the amount of drilling you'll have to do for extra toggle switches.

I'm curious whether your two single coils can be made to fit in the existing neck humbucker cavity. It could happen...

 

[TamirE]

thanks for your reply.
I actually hope i won't have a phasing problem... to actually make sure i won't is a different story...

The jeff beck startocaster has exactly what i'm talking about - gold and blue lace sensors acting as a humbucker, but in the bridge position (and ofcourse there's a mini switch to select only one lace sensor, like a humbucker split).

I think i'll have humbucker tap switches for the humbucker+middle position, not the bridge. and nothing more than that.

the two switches i need are for the cool rails and for the lace sensors. i think i'll have to cut some piece of wood from the neck humbucker cavity to make it possible. too bad i don't have a pickguard on that guitar... would be much easier.

the plan now is to buy 2 push pull pots (i only have two knobs there - one volume and one tone) and using their switching capabilities for splitting the middle and neck "humbuckers".
it's much easier to wire it too. i already have the schematics ready thanks to seymour duncan's website
I'm not too sure about how to wire the two lace sensors to act as one 4 conductor humbucker... in theory, i know the answer, but i'll have to try it and see...

if it's not possible, i'll just have to buy a H-S-S guitar with no pickups and add a 3rd electric guitar to my collection
I just need a guitar and two humbuckers to actually do that.
hmmm... I guess i'll have to wait untill i get the ibanez back. the guitar tech doing the fret grind&polish said he doesn't think it's possible...

 

[TamirE]

ok, i have this rough schematics of what i'm going to try... ofcourse i'll have to look for errors and problems...
I think i'll use 500k push-pull pots...

what do you guys think?

the 2 most important problems:
1. is it ok to actually wire the cool rails differently than what the "manual" says, so when it's split it'll be hum cancelling with the split JB-4?
2. Are the two lace sensors wired correctly - so that they could be used together in series or just the blue alone, depending on the switch?

please help...

notice that the seymour duncan color code is a bit different than other pickups - i think it's:
Red ~~~~~~ Green
White ~~~~~~ Black

*i've found an error in the south coil selection of the middle humbucker and fixed it... it should work great now.
*i've changed the lace sensors' wiring - that's stiil something i'm not so certain about...