[AaronW]

I really love the wiring setup on Neal’s Santa Cruz. I’m planning a build and would like to have a similar setup. Anyone here know how I’d go about that? This is the setup:

Master Volume
Master Tone
3-Way pickup selector switch

3-Way mini toggle: up is Middle pickup only, middle adds middle pickup to the three-way pickup selector(so you could have neck/middle, middle/bridge, all pickups), down is middle pickup off.

Any wiring gurus could help out with what mini switch I’d need and how to wire it?

Thanks!

[sw72]

Look up Free-Way Switch. It will save you from having to install too many mini toggles. A Free-Way switch is a replacement pick up selector switch that takes a traditional two way pick up selector and turns in into a 10 way or 6 way selector. No added routing required. You can then select any pick up or a blend of pickups. Made in England if my memory serves me correctly. I put one in a modified Scott Walker where a middle pick up was installed (split Super II).

[AaronW]

Thanks! That is awesome!

[playingdead]

Brad Sarno came up with that switch idea back in 2010 or so when he and I were discussing wiring on a lefty Scott Walker Special that Scott was building for me ... I wanted the guitar to do the Jerry middle pickup thing, plus have a Les Paul style mode with the bridge and neck humbuckers, then be able to add the middle pickup to the bridge and neck pickup (or all three) to get that Weir 78-81 tone. Also had a toggle to split the humbuckers. We called it the Sarno Switch. It essentially became three guitars in one.

It worked well. Ironically, I had the Walker rewired recently and used a Freeway switch instead of the Sarno Switch because I wanted that toggle to let me switch between single coil, parallel and series wiring on the humbuckers.

The Freeway switch is a little complicated to use, though, it has 6 positions like a little gear shifter on a car, and it's really difficult (for me) to use live, I have trouble selecting what I want on the fly.

The Sarno Switch was much more intuitive. Just my experience with it.

Brad may have some input for you.