Bare Knuckle Pickups Forum
Forum Ringside => Pickups => Topic started by: krsa on June 19, 2022, 07:33:25 AM
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Hi Folks
I have a mahogany/maple top bodied guitar with a BKP Crawler Humbucker in the bridge and BKP mothers milk single coils in the middle and neck. The selector switch is currently a toggle three way and I am considering changing to a six way to allow neck, neck/middle, middle, middle/bridge and bridge options. Can any of you knowledgeable folks advise me of a wiring diagram and also if 250 or 500 pots would be best (guitar only has one volume and one tone control) and lastly which capacitors and tone bleeds to maintain treble you would use. Thank you in advance
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For the six way toggle switch I would look to Freeway switches. They have various diagrams on their website.
Volume pots: the basic convention is that humbuckers are used with 500k and single coils with 250k. With your pickup selection I would support this convention as the Crawler is a rather dark pickup whereas the MMs are vintage flavored (i.e. rather bright). The solution is to use a 500k volume pot and use resistors to ground to bring the load in the other positions down to about 250k.
Tone pot: matter of personal preference. 500k isolates whatever cap you use further from the ground, 250k may have a more useful change of tone in the rotation.
Treble bleed circuit: also a matter of personal preference. I would get a few resistors (220k, 330k, 470k, 680k and 1meg, 1/8 watt is fine) and a few cap values (180pf, 220pf, 330pf, 470pf, 560pf, 680pf, 1000pf) and experiment. It also depends on the actual volume pot/pickup combination. In my PRS Custom, I am happy with just the 180pf cap. I added a 1meg resistor once but removed it immediately. In other guitars I use something like 220k in parallel with a 470pf cap. I test it with a crunchy sound and see whether it retains enough highs but still cleans up.
Cheers Stephan