Tele HH Wiring Issues - ground hum + sound

[Old Tooth Hopkins]

Hi All,

Haven't been here for a while - having a baby kept me away..

So about a year ago I "finished" the TL-1TB kit - by "finished", I meant to a level where it's considered complete but the tinkering would go on..

The wiring consists of a 5 way switch, which has the following arrangement:

1. Neck Humbucker
2. Neck Humbucker + Bridge Split Coil
3. Bridge Split
4. Bridge Hum
5. master kill switch

Whilst it's "playable", there has been a few very notable issues, which I hope people on this forum can help.

1. Ground hum.

I forgot to connect the ground wire to the bushings on the tune-o-matic, so it's quite buzzy regardless of which switch setting - but especially positions 2-4 the buzz is worse than single coil on my fender strat.

Can the bushings be "gently" removed and I re-ground the wiring?

2. Position 1, Neck Humbucker tone and volume

I was going to make both humbuckers coil splitable, but I stuffed up the stock neck pick up. Thankfully knowing my likely clumsiness I bought another "stock" ish humbucker online but from memory the resistance was higher, roughly 8-9 k (I suspect they were meant to be LP type humbuckers). After the coil split accident before I left the humbucker as is this time, but once wired up the volume was HUGE, way too big, compared to other positions. It is also very "bassy", i.e. Jazz comping sounds reasonably good, any strumming it's a mess of a sound. At lower volume (like 5/10) it just makes an acceptable tone.

Is there a way of making it "less bassy" without changing the pick up?

I adjusted the distance between pickup and strings to be the "recommended distance", and afraid can't go any lower. Maybe I needed that pickup to go on a dedicated capacitor? The tone pot makes no obvious difference

3. position 3 and 4 don't sound much different at all, I suspected I may have severed the thin wire to connect to the second winding, so both of them are essentially single coils, would explain the buzz.


My plan now is to procure a dual rail single coil and put that in the bridge position, and revert back to the 3-way switch,

1. neck hum
2. neck hum + bridge dual rail
3. bridge dual rail

any tips to make the two "balanced" on volume if the two pots are master volume and master tone?

Thank you all in advance!


EDIT + More info:

The original wiring was based off this...

https://www.seymourduncan.com/wp-con...WSPL_1V_1T.pdf

I noticed that on this one, the volume is 500k pot, whereas the supplied ones from pitbull is 250k I think. The tone pot is not specified.

This wiring diagram also didn't make it 100% clear of the ground cable, hence I missed it.

The new wiring I want to do

https://www.seymourduncan.com/wp-con..._1TH_3B_2V.jpg

I noticed that in this arrangement there are two volumes - is that so the player can dial the volume so they are roughly the same as one may be louder than the other?

i.e. theoretically if it's 1 hum and 1 dual rail, as above, can it be wired in the following arrangement?

https://www.seymourduncan.com/wp-con...H_3B_1V_1T.jpg


edit 2: I am starting to resolve my own issue? The main discrepency between the Sey-D schematics and the PitBull ones are the pot values. The sey-D say to use 250k pots but I think the pitbull supplied ones are 500k for both vol. and tone.

according to this site this could be a solution

https://www.fralinpickups.com/2017/1...ls-humbuckers/

https://www.realparts.com.au/500k-25...ntric-pot.html

My goal for the dual rail is a single coil sounding bridge pickup but noiseless. My Fender Strat has that in the bridge position, a schecter dual rail, which is what I'm after, but one that is voiced for the tele.

[Simon Barden]

1. Yes. You need a longish bolt of the same diameter/thread (should be a standard M size for the kit bushings), screw it in until it touches the wood at the base of the cavity and then keep turning it slowly. As long as the body wood is hard enough, the bushing will start lifting out.

However it does sound like there is more to it than just the bridge grounding if the bridge humbucker is also noisy. Does sound like a ground wire problem somewhere. Or a problem with bare wires touching the copper shielding.

2. The tone pot should have an effect, so again it sounds like a wiring or grounding issue. A 500k pot would certainly make the pickup less bassy, but you would be better off swapping the humbuckers round so the more powerful one is in the bridge.


3. Possibly, or again, maybe a grounding issue.

I'd be tempted to unsolder the pickup wires from the selector switch and just check out the winding resistances on all the coils.

New wiring. No specific reason that there are two volumes and no tone on that SD diagram. Just a personal choice if you want that option.

I am not sure why the V + T + 2 x HB SD diagram has 250k pots. 500k would be normal for normal humbuckers, but maybe it's really designed to be used with Fender Wide Range humbuckers, which are a lot brighter. But for standard humbuckers I'd stick with 500k. Or they may have just copied some of it from a standard Tele wiring diagram, which is the same wiring except the diagram shows humbuckers instead of single coils. Mistakes are made.

There is no easy way to get two pickup outputs balancing, apart from choosing pickups designed to work together. You'd normally expect the bridge to be either equal to, or slightly louder than the neck pickup. You can mess about with resistors and bleed capacitors, but it's never going to be easy. And you've also got to fit them in the tight space of a Tele control cavity.

If you want a noiseless single coil sound, then the output certainly won't be as great as a lot of humbuckers, so you'll probably need to match it with a low output PAF-style humbucker (or maybe a Gretsch style one). Certainly not the current over-powerful neck pickup you've got.

[McCreed]

1. Yes. You need a longish bolt of the same diameter/thread (should be a standard M size for the kit bushings), screw it in until it touches the wood at the base of the cavity and then keep turning it slowly. As long as the body wood is hard enough, the bushing will start lifting out.

If you don't have the right size bolt (typically M8 in import stuff) you achieve the same thing by placing an ordinary flathead screw upside down (head first) into the bushing and then screwing the threaded post back in. The inserted upside down screw just needs to be shorter than the depth on the bushing, and the head small enough diameter to fit down on the M8 hole.

Is there a way of making it "less bassy" without changing the pick up?

Since your no longer going for any splitting of the coils, the PBG 500k pots will be fine.
As for the too "bassy" tone of the neck HB (one man's bassy is another man's muddy ) there is a solution.

The way I've dealt with muddy neck HB's is adding a simple high-pass filter circuit. It's just a series/parallel capacitor & resistor, like this:


You can also do it like this before or at the switch (treat HB as though it is 2 conductor):


You can play with the cap value to effect how much low end is cut, but the .01uf typically works fine.

I did not come up with this, so credit where credit is due, goes to Artie_Too at the SD forum.