[playingdead]

It's almost time to start building my Scott Walker guitar, so I'm thinking about wiring ...

As I've posted before, I want to combine the flexibility of a Les Paul bridge-neck system with the convenience of the Strat-style wiring. The goal is to have independent volume and tone on neck and bridge pickups, so it can be set clean on the neck and flipped over for serious overdrive on the bridge pickup, something that works terrifically on the AxeFX when you're playing some of the higher gain amp models, like the Dumble or Trainwreck, etc.

I would have a Super II in the middle, and probably some sort of PAF-style pickups at neck and bridge.

I was looking at Weir's Cowboy guitar, and it occurred to me that it might be interesting to do three smaller knobs as volumes for each individual pickup, then have the larger knobs be a master volume, bridge-middle tone and neck tone. I also want to put in the OBEL, and a Waldo buffer, but have it be bypassable. Wire all three pickups to a 5-way switch; two toggles for single-coil or double-coil (gang the neck and bridge), toggle for the effects loop and toggle to bypass the buffer.

Does that sound feasible?

[NashvilleMike]

Guess you better drop by MIT and talk to them about this one Vic.

[drewfx]

A fair amount of wiring, but seems very doable to me. I'd use 1Meg pots and probably the treble-bypass-cap-thingy on the 3 individual volumes though.

Not sure exactly what you mean by "gang the neck and bridge" though - standard single/double coil switches for each of the two, or something else?

drewfx

[playingdead]

One tone control for bridge and middle, and one for the neck; and one single coil switch for bridge and neck, and one for the middle. Not sure if that's do-able or not, though.

[broesau]

As long as you don't want individual volumes for the bridge and middle, why don't you go with one concentric pot for the bridge & middle tone/volume and one concentric pot for neck tone/volume. I really don't have much experience w/ concentric pots, but you seem pretty dexterous. Have you thought about individual on/off/on switches for the pickups? Although between those and the loop/buffer switches your guitar might look like the dash of a Mack Truck.

[playingdead]

I thought about that, as well, but thinking about my old Les Paul Custom, which I modified with a middle Strat pickup (no volume on that at all), one of the most pleasing things to be able to do was put on the neck and bridge pickups and adjust them individually, both volumes and tones, you can get a really wide variety of sounds out of the guitar that way, especially the neck pickup. Being able to set that up to the sweet spot, and still have a master volume would be useful, seems like that's what Brad did with Stu Allen's SG.

Fewer knobs and buttons is better, just trying to think how to approach it logically as a player. Master volume seems best of both worlds to me, but I don't know how it would affect the overall tone running through two volume pots like that. Using a 5-way would not allow me to have all three pickups on simultaneously, but I don't think that's a huge loss.