Pickup Wiring

[McCreed]

I just did a "check-out" with that switch, that price is excluding GST, and is $15 shipping!

[JimC]

Often the way, the big wholesalers arent geared up for small orders. You just have to look at the bottom line. If you don't need a bunch of stuff the specialist may work out cheaper.

[Tassieaxeman]

Hi mate, consider a blend pot. But as far as parts here in Australia. Try Australian luthier supplies.
They are fantastic to deal with. I'm in remote Tassie and you can't get squat here. So I use them all the time. P.S Seymour Duncan wiring site will answer any wiring questions.

[Bit Confused]

Yeah, I'm in rural NSW and it's hard to find anything here, Also, how does a blend pot work (I'm pretty new to these things, all the guitars I own are pretty strait-forward controls)

[Simon Barden]

A blend pot has two stacked potentiometers on a common shaft, one working the opposite way to the other. So you attach the output of one pickup to one of the sets of contacts and the other pickup to the other (but with contacts reversed). the pot outputs are commoned up. So you go from one end of the pot (all pickup 1) to midway (equal pickup 1 + 2) to the other end (all pickup 2).

It's something that you see on bass guitars, but personally it's not something I'd use on an electric guitar as that mid-position will be a lot quieter than the mixed position on a selector switch, as both signals will be around 6dB down due to the pot taper (roughly half the volume). You can simulate this on a standard guitar by switching to the mixed position and turning the volume knob to 5. It's also going to take you a bit longer to go from full neck to full bridge pickup (and vice-versa). Volume drops could be mitigated by always using a compressor, but that's going to have an affect on the way the guitar sounds that you may or may not find appropriate.

The benefits are that you can get a range of tones from blending the pickups that simply aren't available with 3-way switching on a 2-pickup guitar.

[Bit Confused]

After all this, it seems that what I want really isn’t that simple, I haven’t ordered anything yet, do you think It would be easier just to rethink how I’m setting it out.