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Post by gbowman on Feb 7, 2022 12:08:50 GMT -7
Hi Folks - I'm about to tinker with the wiring of my Strat to address a wiring issue and thought while I was in there, I might change how the tone controls work. I'm currently using tone one for neck PU only and tone two for bridge only. I think this is what is called the Eric Johnson wiring. Anyways, I have created a poll to see what setups folks are using or prefer. Thanks!
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Post by Ridgeback on Feb 7, 2022 12:30:08 GMT -7
For me, it really depends on the pickups but I voted T1N and T2 M+B. One of my two has this, after I added the B to the M tone pot. The other one has a master tone and a N+B blend pot. The only Strat I've actually liked the blend pot concept on, but it works for me on this particular guitar with these pickups. In the past, I've been perfectly happy with a T1 N and a T2 M with no tone control on the bridge.
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Post by GuitarZ on Feb 7, 2022 13:24:38 GMT -7
I went 'other'. I have the Kinman set up where the first control is master volume, second is tone, and the third blends the bridge pickup into whatever pickups are selected by the pickup switch.
I kind of like this set up. With that said, I never touch the tone control and only sometimes mess with the bridge pickup blend volume control to add it to the neck pickup.
I suppose I'd be happy if my strat only had a volume control.
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Post by Mark (Basement Enthusiast) on Feb 7, 2022 13:40:19 GMT -7
I voted "T1 N; T2 M+B" [this is how I have my Strat] but I could probably just as easily work with "T1 N+M; T2 B" since I don't use the middle by itself much and it wouldn't matter much either way. The key for me is to provide some sort of tone control for the bridge, and for it not to be the same one controlling the neck.
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Post by Don A on Feb 7, 2022 15:16:25 GMT -7
On a vintage style Strat, I just move the middle pickup tone control wire to the bridge pickup lug on the switch.
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Post by heynewguy (Ol’ Bill) on Feb 7, 2022 15:58:58 GMT -7
OTHER
I have three Strats. They are all wired this way. Master Volume Master Tone Blend With the Blend you get all 5 positions plus you can Blend the Neck to the Bridge and the Bridge to the Neck. (Think Telecaster with both pickups) You also get in the middle switch position all three pickups. IMHO all Strats should be wired this way.
As always YMMV.
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Post by adam on Feb 7, 2022 16:34:03 GMT -7
I'm most comfortable with neck and middle on one tone pot and bridge on the other.
Saw something recently with Scott Henderson saying his Strats are wired so that the combo settings (neck/middle and bridge/middle) are wired to bypass the tone controls. That makes a lot of sense to me.
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Post by headshrinker (Marc) on Feb 7, 2022 16:36:42 GMT -7
I'm with Bill right above. No sense writing it out again. Okay, two above. Adam snuck in.
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Post by Seńor Verde on Feb 7, 2022 18:05:35 GMT -7
My Strat has a blend pot so I can bring up the neck volume at any setting, to get all three pickups or neck and bridge, along with the usual combinations. The tone control has a push-push pot, that is connected normally so it controls all 3 pickups, but I can take it out of the circuit whenever I want.
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Post by loucardguitar (Johnathan) on Feb 7, 2022 18:52:06 GMT -7
I voted N & M on T1 and B on T2. That being said, I could most likely be just as satisfied with the EJ wiring with the middle wide open and N on T1 and B on T2. That being said, I would almost always need a dedicated tone to the bridge though.
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Post by nick0 on Feb 8, 2022 11:15:48 GMT -7
OTHER
My favorite is to wire a master volume and master tone for all three pickups. Put the master volume in the T1 position and the master tone in the T2 position. Gets the volume pot out of the way.
I'm upgrading one of my strats to an HSS now. New pups, pickguard, neck, tuners, bridge, wiring.... the works! Basically a new guitar at this point. Should be setting it up and testing tonight. I'm wiring it up with a super switch to automatically tap the bridge in position 2. Also, I'm running 500K pots and wiring a resistor in parallel with positions 2,3,4, & 5 in order to get roughly 250K with the singles and 500K with the bucker. I did something similar with a SH tele and it works great! Went with Lollar vintage blond neck and middle and a low wind imperial in the bridge. I'm excited!
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Post by mcook217 on Feb 11, 2022 8:53:41 GMT -7
I've tinkered with every wiring mod you can think of for a strat (at one point i even added 2 additional pickups and got the pickup combos up to... I think it was something like 36). I finally settled on getting the emerson custom prewired kit that was MV+MT+Blender for neck into Bridge. I, of course, couldn't leave that alone and i made it so it was MV, Bridge Tone, and Blender, having the neck and middle bypass the tone control, since i never used the tone control with those pickups anyway. It is awesome! Super straty, and every position is finally useable and sounds great. I found if you go to the 2 position(B+M), bring in the neck position on the blender, and roll the tone off of the bridge pickup it pushes the mids and gives a really honky Money For Nothing tone, and it's only on that position. So you can still have normal 3,4, and 5, while 2 is an awesome funky solo tone (1 - with the tone all the way off, is still usable with a fuzz).
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Post by gbowman on Feb 11, 2022 9:39:56 GMT -7
Good responses so far, thanks!
I have finally settled on this setup: Neck + tone 1, middle not connected to any tone, bridge + tone 2. I tried the blender pot and found that prefer setting a tone control and leaving it. With the blender I always had to make an adjustment after selecting other pickups. On the topic of selecting, I have my 5 way switch wired so in position 3 there is no (standalone) middle pickup, but instead the neck and bridge come on. I can't recall the last time I used the middle alone so removing that setting is not a loss. I still have the 2 and 4 quacks available.
Also, I am using 0.0022 (not a typo) caps. I just wanted to remove the icy highs without wrecking the character of the PUs. I never use a "woman tone" so big capacitors don't make sense. There is a cap on each tone control instead of the typical sharing because of my neck+bridge wiring. The 0.0022 thing gives me a perfect way to tame and shape, rather than just throwing a blanket over the sound...
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Post by nick0 on Feb 11, 2022 15:27:48 GMT -7
Those are some really cool decisions. Nice! Hope you like it!
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Post by markT on Mar 9, 2022 4:07:45 GMT -7
T1 N; M wide open; T2 B for me on all my Strat's. Otherwise known as the Eric Johnson mod. I find I roll the bridge pickup tone back to about 8 most of the time, but not when using position 4. I also change my cap value to 0.22 or 0.15 to get more use out of the tone control.
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Post by Don A on Mar 9, 2022 6:38:42 GMT -7
T1 N; M wide open; T2 B for me on all my Strat's. Otherwise known as the Eric Johnson mod. I got it from Jimmie Vaughan, if I recall. I think it's how it was done in Texas in the '70s and later. It reminds me of a time when Strats were mysterious- we didn't understand what was going on under the hood. I remember the first time I pulled a Strat's pickguard, saw that all 3 pickups were the same and wired the same, and wondered how it got those funky "out of phase" (I didn't know better) in between sounds with 3 similar pickups! Years before that, a friend had a MiJ Strat clone, and we wondered what went on under the chrome bridge cover and back cover plate. We didn't dare take it apart! All we knew was that if you touched the "wammy bar", the guitar would end up wildly out of tune!
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Post by GuitarZ on Mar 9, 2022 16:53:24 GMT -7
I got it from Jimmie Vaughan, if I recall. I think it's how it was done in Texas in the '70s and later. It reminds me of a time when Strats were mysterious- we didn't understand what was going on under the hood. I remember the first time I pulled a Strat's pickguard, saw that all 3 pickups were the same and wired the same, and wondered how it got those funky "out of phase" (I didn't know better) in between sounds with 3 similar pickups! Years before that, a friend had a MiJ Strat clone, and we wondered what went on under the chrome bridge cover and back cover plate. We didn't dare take it apart! All we knew was that if you touched the "wammy bar", the guitar would end up wildly out of tune! Man! I was lucky! I had an older brother that became an electrical engineer (and I followed). But, I'm thinking when I got my first electric guitar, it was nothing to pull out the electronics to have a look. And, my brother would explain how things worked. That was pretty cool!
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Post by nick0 on Mar 9, 2022 17:06:13 GMT -7
My first pickup swap when I was about 13 years old: I told my dad I needed solder. He gave me a roll of solder used to sweat copper pipe (he was a plumber). I couldn't figure out what the problem was.... it look a LONG time to do that first mod.... LOL!!
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Post by Don A on Mar 9, 2022 17:54:39 GMT -7
My first pickup swap when I was about 13 years old: I told my dad I needed solder. He gave me a roll of solder used to sweat copper pipe (he was a plumber). I couldn't figure out what the problem was.... it look a LONG time to do that first mod.... LOL!!
I used plumbing solder and flux with a big Weller gun. I still have the Weller gun.
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Post by JonesKY on Apr 5, 2022 8:56:50 GMT -7
I voted "other"... 1) volume 2) tone 3) blend I like the simplicity of the telecaster's master volume and tone so that carries over to my Strat layout AND I really like the sound of the neck and bridge together (again, there's that Tele influence). although different sounding, the Strat and Tele back each other up nicely.
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Post by JonesKY on Apr 5, 2022 9:15:06 GMT -7
T1 N; M wide open; T2 B for me on all my Strat's. Otherwise known as the Eric Johnson mod. I find I roll the bridge pickup tone back to about 8 most of the time, but not when using position 4. I also change my cap value to 0.22 or 0.15 to get more use out of the tone control. I go in the other direction for tone caps: Strat has a .1u - original for the 1960 CS (and evidently the actual 1960), and opened my ears to the sonic possibilities. Tele has a .05u (actually a .047u). NOTE: perhaps because I also use brighter low-wind humbuckers, the (slightly) darker Fenders mix reasonably well with the brighter Gibsons.
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Post by markT on Apr 12, 2022 3:03:54 GMT -7
T1 N; M wide open; T2 B for me on all my Strat's. Otherwise known as the Eric Johnson mod. I find I roll the bridge pickup tone back to about 8 most of the time, but not when using position 4. I also change my cap value to 0.22 or 0.15 to get more use out of the tone control. I go in the other direction for tone caps: Strat has a .1u - original for the 1960 CS (and evidently the actual 1960), and opened my ears to the sonic possibilities. Tele has a .05u (actually a .047u). NOTE: perhaps because I also use brighter low-wind humbuckers, the (slightly) darker Fenders mix reasonably well with the brighter Gibsons. Cool....however, to go darker than the .047 on single coils is totally useless to me. Glad it works for you though.
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Post by zpilot on Apr 14, 2022 14:57:59 GMT -7
I am a Tele guy so to keep things sort of consistent I only have 2 knobs. A Master Volume and a Tone control wired only to the Bridge pickup with a .015 cap. I pretty much live on the B+M setting on the switch when playing a Strat. So I punched "other".
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Post by gbowman on Apr 19, 2022 14:28:52 GMT -7
Well after all the fooling around with wiring and pickups, I got the Strat to sound pretty good. However, I can't get the neck/action happening, so fergit it. Back to my 535.
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Post by zpilot on May 16, 2022 6:24:54 GMT -7
I am a Tele guy so to keep things sort of consistent I only have 2 knobs. A Master Volume and a Tone control wired only to the Bridge pickup with a .015 cap. I pretty much live on the B+M setting on the switch when playing a Strat. So I punched "other". On a Strat build I just finished I decided to go with a slightly different set-up. EJ wiring for the tone controls (no control on middle pu). I searched my stash for the highest value 250KA pot to use for the Vol. control. I found one which measured 279K. I matched that with a .033uF tone cap. I think that is going to be my new go-to for Strats. 300KA Volume and .033uF tone. 300KA is hard to find. There are some for sale on Amazon, etc. but I think they are actually just 250s toward the upper end of the tolerance so it is a crap shoot what you get. I found Lindy Fralin sells 300s and I would expect those to be more consistent. For the record I am like Jason Lollar and do not like treble bleed mods. It is all just an LCR filter after all and your results may be different with your pickups. For this build I used a VERY old set of DiMarzio Blue Velvet pickups I've had laying around for 23 years. Tried to sell them but no one was interested. Glad I didn't. I had forgot how good they sound.
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Post by doctorice on May 16, 2022 6:59:23 GMT -7
I have Strats with a variety of tone wirings: standard, EJ, EC, master tone and blender (neck, bridge), etc. It's a good excuse to own a bunch
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