Franken-beater project

[maxadudley]

Hello wiring lads,
I've done a little wiring in the past, with varying degrees of success.
I have a project I'm working on, a Strat body that I've cut a speaker cavity into and bored out under the pickguard to fit the guts of a cigar box amplifier into.
Surprisingly, it's been working (a real Dr. Frankenstein "it's aliiiiiiive!!" moment when the little LED indicator came on)
Sounds pretty cruddy, even for what it was, and I am in the process of upgrading various parts.

My main wiring question is this: Can I wire in a couple random pickups (one humbucker, one p90) to a single master tone and master volume pot? I don't want to mess with a pickup selector switch at all.
Would this work: wiring both pickups to the same lug on the volume pot and then out to a tone pot, like as if there was just one pickup, but another set of wires piggybacking on the same soldering points?
Am I completely nuts?

[Simon Barden]

You can do that, but you’ll get the pickups wired in parallel, so it will sound like the middle position of a 3-way switch that both the pickups are wired to. So if you don’t want a switch, then you’ll need to like that combination sound.

[Simon Barden]

If you don’t use the tone pot you could have a blend pot and a volume pot. No switch, no extra holes, but you’ll get a wide range of sounds.

[maxadudley]

Simon, good to see you here too! You helped a lot with my IC-1 Iceman build.

That's a great suggestion with the blend pot. That s much closer to what I want. I will look into that as an option. Here's a dumb question: does it need to be a specific "blender" pot or can I use a regular 500k pot that was originally purchased for the purposes of a tone pot?
Preliminary research points to that it is it's own animal, a different and specific mechanism.

[Simon Barden]

It’s a specific type of pot, a dual stacked pot, one is audio taper, the other is reverse audio taper, so that as you turn it, one signal gets louder as the other signal gets quieter.

Then you feed the output from that to the common volume pot.

[maxadudley]

Wonderful. Thank you very much for the advice! I will let you know how it goes, or when I inevitably have more questions. Thanks again.

[OliSam]

If you don’t use the tone pot you could have a blend pot and a volume pot. No switch, no extra holes, but you’ll get a wide range of sounds.

Thats a great idea!


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