Wiring and electronics for versatility

[casual_lurker]

I want to modify my HSH Ibanez RG in order to achieve a tone close to single coil, or just different sounds.

Here is what I have:

Neck: 2 conductor SD '59, I am reading that it can be split with some rewiring.

Middle: Stock pickup, it's ok for now.

Bridge: 4 conductor JB, splitting with volume push-pull switch.

5 position blade switch.

Here is the control cavity - to the left is the push/pull volume, to the right the tone control:



Alternate view

I also have a spare on-on-on mini switch (I won't drill for it yet, but I can stick it in to see what tones I can get, and then decide if I want a permanent installation), this book, and a soldering iron


What I want: to get as close to strat single coil dynamics and responsiveness as I can get without buying a strat. Coil splitting, out of phase wiring, I don't know what else there is.

How can I do it?

[Sensible Musician]

First of all, with just what you have right there, here's what I would do:
1)B
2)B(slug) + M
3)M
4)M + N(screw)
5)N

wire the push/pull for neck parallel

That gives you a really conventional superstrat/versatile setup. If you haven't had a guitar wired this way before, that would be a good bet.

Having said that, I can tell you that I went through an insane obsession with versatile guitars and finally came out the other side playing literally everything on a hacked Dot with very classic PAF's - even when that's clearly an inappropriate guitar, even though I have a big home office overflowing with guitars. I have found that it is inestimably better to have a voice - that one small set of variations on a sound that I know better than my literal voice (because I hear it the same way that others hear me).

The last two stages I went through before that were almost as good. I started by making all my guitars utterly conventional - e.g. a strat was a 50's strat, either maple or rosewood, but nothing out of the ordinary; then I simply spot fixed things that bothered me about each guitar - things that I couln't graft into my mind and make transparent. On strats I went with a hybrid bridge pickup design in a reverse angle, scott henderson style switching, and a 3n3 cap across the neck pickup on a push/pull. It's still a very classically voiced strat, just with all the broken stuff fixed - ice pick bridge, string balance (flat poles except proud 1st string pole). Actually there are a lot of subtle refinements on those guitars: rubber ring on volume knob, 16mm pots for effortless control, pots hacked to deliver perfect taper and range, etc. etc.. Just any little thing that bothered me I fixed it. No preplanning, no imagining what might be fun to try, just, "What is getting in my way as I try to sing through this prosthetic voice?"

A versatile guitar is one that functions as a very comfortable prosthesis - not one that has 85 unique combinations, each of which requires fiddly adjustments. Guitar is a musical instrument, so the versatility it lends is musical versatility; this comes from the player's mind and depends on the guitar only so much as the guitar gets out of the way.

It was a very long road for me to figure this out; hopefully you can get there faster than I did. Just try to find the guitar that turns you on the most for playing your own music - where every sound from every switch position is golden in every register - and that will work best for whatever you are doing.

The world is full of great musicians making great music on the "wrong" guitar, from Paul Jackson Jr. using a Les Paul with P90's for R&B to John5 using a telecaster for metal. Find your voice in the instrument and you will have a versatile guitar.

Oh yeah one more thing: I play a lot of instrumental music lately - instrumental covers of R&B hits. Like smooth jazz but it's just to warm crowds up to the singer who's about to come on. Anyway people always come up and say that the way we do the song sounds exactly like the recording - this is an enthusiastic compliment. But in fact what we are doing is nothing like the recording; we are reharmonizing on the spot, sometimes getting a little silly; I'm very liberally reinterpreting melody... But people persistently choose those exact words as a compliment - it sounds just like the song. I'm satisfied that people recognize that what the band likes about the song and what they like about the song are the same. Point being I'm not even on the same type of instrument (voice vs. guitar) and people connect with it. So I no longer worry at all about having the exact right guitar sound or a great palette of varied sounds; I just make sure that my sound is my voice and everything seems to work out fine.

[walterw]

excellent point!

"versatility" is a tricky concept on string instruments; how versatile is a plain ol' tele? hell, a P-bass? a violin?

overly clever and complex wiring schemes with forests of switches and knobs often leave you with a few sounds that are useful, a bunch of sounds that aren't, a bunch more you can't really tell apart, and my favorite, the occasional "surprise off switch"!

that said, it's pretty easy to wire up a H-S-H guitar with a stock 5-way to auto-split the humbuckers on 2 and 4, and to use a push-pull to turn both buckers into single coils in all settings.

[casual_lurker]

Good point indeed, thanks. I am at the beginning of my tone quest, still loads to learn - or better yet, experience. One way or another, I will .

So what is the best way to get some coil vibe going on in the neck position? I haven't tried the parallel wiring thing, it sounds dynamic and lively on youtube but I don't trust videos very much.

[torquil]

A neck single coil + a bridge single coil is nice to have in addition to the typical strat combinations. Humbucking of course, which is possible if you select the appropriate coils.