If your 5 way pickup selector isn’t doing enough for you, there is an upgrade that suits your tastes.
A Schaller Megaswitch E+ and a push-pull (or push-push if you prefer) pot will be used. I personally prefer the push-push pot, since I find it a lot more comfortable to use while playing as opposed to the push-pull.
The push-push switch adds 3 more sounds to my existing combination. I wired the 5 way selector for autosplit. Autosplit means that bridge and neck humbucker pickups are automatically split when you select position 2 and 4 respectively. For this particular wiring I used a Schaller E+ 5-way pickup selector.
Before adding the push-push pot my pickup selector was configured as follows:
- position 1: bridge pickup
- position 2: bridge pickup split + middle
- position 3: bridge pickup + neck pickup
- position 4: middle pickup + neck pickup split
- position 5: neck pickup
What I really missed was the option to use just the neck pickup split. But I got more! While using your 5 way selector with the push-pull pot pushed down doesn’t change much, using it with the tone pot “pulled” give you the following new options (in bold):
- position 1: bridge pickup split
- position 2: bridge pickup split + middle
- position 3: bridge pickup split + neck pickup split
- position 4: middle pickup + neck pickup split
- position 5: neck pickup split
Basically it turns an HSH guitar into a SSS just by pulling (or pushing) a pot. And since I never use the middle pickup alone, having the option to select both the bridge and neck pickup split or full adds other interesting sounds.
Here are the wiring schemes (color code is for DiMarzio and Seymour Duncan pickups only! You may want to adapt the scheme to other brands if needed. Check out this page: GuitarElectronics.com pickups color code scheme):
Notice!
If you experience phase cancellation problems in position 2 or 4, just invert the green and red wires (DiMarzio) or green and black (Seymour Duncan) of the corresponding humbucker and you’re done.
May 26th 2019 May 26th 2019
