Could someone check this diagram please?

[Eroma]

Hey friends,

Happy to let you know that it's all working now. I'm so happy :-)
And I can't thank you enough for your support. No way I could have figured it all out by myself.

Later, I'll post some sounds in the sounds section.

[Eroma]

Oh, maybe someone encounters this problem: Everything was working but it still sounded 'thin' in all positions or combinations. I found out that the positive from the jack was touching the conductive paint on the inside of the guitar. When i put some tape between it, solved :-)

[Simon Barden]

Well done! It was quite a complicated scheme to wire all at once, especially for someone not used to doing it. Glad it's all working.

And don't forget, you've still got 3 of WeirdBits other wiring schemes to try!

Yes, conductive paint is a bit harder to track down a short on, as it's got a higher resistance than copper shielding tape, so you get less signal, not total silence.

[SkunkWerx USA]

Hi all, looking for something similar, but minus the three way pickup selector switch, I want to be able to "blend" each of the three pickups, with 0 being quiet, 10 full blast. This is a Telemaster with three Bill Lawrence XL Soapbars, three concentric pots, three on/on/on toggles (one for each pickup), ZERO pickup selector toggles.

So independent volume/tone concentric pot and one three way switch per pickup, then straight out. The idea is to keep it as simple as possible for each pickup. I'm overthinking it, I'm sure, it seems so straightforward, but after seeing another post about independent volume vs. otherwise, my brain shut down. The diagrams within this thread are close, but I just need a fresh perspective. Thank all, great resource here!

[JimC]

It's never quite as simple as at least I thought at first, because the controls all interact with each other. I hope this isn't egg sucking advice, but the trap I've fallen into is to think is thinking that because I draw it all in a neat row from left to right the signal will go like that. Well it will, but it will also go backwards and round the houses, because the signals aren't electronically separated. So although you have individual tone controls on each pickup, in fact all the tone controls affect all the pickups to a greater or lesser amount, and the volume settings can also affect the tone. This makes my head hurt so much trying to figure it out I've given up and just have one tone control on my guitars!

Thus the order you have things in makes a big difference. If things are in the order pickup -> vol -> tone -> switch then each tone control affects the sound on all pickups while its switch is on, even if the volume on that pickup is turned down to 0. If you have order pickup -> tone -> vol -> switch then the tone control won't affect the other pickups when it's volume is 0, but still will as the volume is turned up.

Practically speaking the takeaway is that you can't have a big treble cut on one pickup and full treble from another. How much this is an issue is down to you. It hurts my sense of order, but great guitarists have been getting great sound out of guitars with multiple tone controls since they were invented without giving a damn about how the knobs interact, just twiddling until the sound was right. It gets even worse if you throw phase and coil tap in the mix.

At the moment I've gone off complex multi switch wiring a bit. Too many of the combinations didn't seem to offer much. I suppose in an ideal world I'd build a new guitar with a temporary setup so I could try every possible combination, then simplify it so only the good ones were left, but I'm not disciplined enough or for that matter enthusiastic enough about soldering...

[WeirdBits]

Independent volumes without a selector switch means all of the pots are always in the circuit, and that's essentially doubled with concentric volume/tone pairs. This can make the sound darker than a standard switched arrangement, on top of the potential tone interactions, so be prepared. Increasing the pot values can help compensate, eg. going from 500K to 1M Ω, so I've marked that on the layout. Hopefully this is what you wanted:



Note: the wiring colours are different for Bill Lawrence (Bill & Becky) and Bill Lawrence U.S.A marked pickups, so if you have the latter you'll need to change the connections on the mini-switches.

For 'Bill Lawrence U.S.A' pickups, connect:
Red where White is on the mini-switches.
White where Green is on the mini-switches.
Green where Red is on the mini-switches.
Black & Blue/Bare stay the same.

Let me know if anything is unclear.

[SkunkWerx USA]

First of all, thank you both for your brain power. I see the conundrum, pretty much what I had feared. But... I believe I will give this latest iteration a go, and just see what it produces. The guitar itself is kinda "dark" in concept, so it might lend itself well to that path. I'd upload a pic, butit'll have none of it. I'll keep you posted of the results, and thanks again.

[McCreed]

I've got nothing...

except to say what a great asset WeirBits is to this community!

Good on ya Scott!