Michael1987xl
New Member
In another thread on Coil Splitting, LesPaulopolis had asked if I wouldn’t mind posting some wiring diagrams I used to wire up my latest Les Paul, which is pretty extreme even for me. Rather than hijack his very specific thread, given the nature, length and complexity of what I did, I thought it would be best to give this a stand-alone thread.
It’s best to take what I did in stages, or it will be undecipherable, so I have to break it down a bit. First, a little background on what I was after. For my latest Les Paul, I wanted as many wiring options/sounds as possible, just because that’s how I am. After using the Seymour Duncan Triple shots in another guitar and based on my previous experience with the Jimmy Page wiring in a few other guitars, I wanted to find a way to mix the two together, as I figured this was the most effective way of getting everything in one axe. Besides, rotary switches drive me nuts and I already had these parts. Keep in mind that these diagrams are tailored for use with DiMarzio 4-wire pickups, so the color schemes may not match what everyone has. Finally, please keep in mind that a basic understanding of how DPDT mini-switches work is necessary here, or you’re going to get lost in all of this awfully quick.
To begin, I had already mixed the TS's and the JP Harness on one guitar and it works fine, but because the JP harness had already been wired in and the TS’s were added later, it required foregoing the coil tap function on the volume Push/Pulls. I wanted to avoid having useless Push/Pulls on this current Les Paul, so I came up with the idea of using the volume P/P's to handle phasing functions of the slug coils. I had a pre-wired Jimmy Page Harness from Torres Engineering which I was going to use as my starting point. As it comes, (for those who are unfamiliar) it allows you to use the volume knob push/pull knobs to coil tap its respective pickup. The push/pull on the neck tone knob would put the pickups in series with each other. The push/pull on the bridge tone would put the pickups out of phase with each other (it achieves this by switching the phase on the bridge pickup ONLY. This will be key much later on). The harness comes all wired, set and looks like this:
The fact that all the wires are either black or white can make you crazy at first, but Torres includes some really detailed diagrams so that all you have to do is attach the pickups and jack, and off you go. With a little patience, a magnifying hobby lamp and some determination, you can figure out how it’s assembled in about 15 minutes.
Next, the Seymour Duncan Triple shots (for those who aren’t familiar with them) contain 2 small switches in the pickup rings themselves, and a small, color coded circuit board. By attaching the pickups to the small board, you are left with only 2 wires to connect to the pot assemblies. The Triple Shots, as they come configured allow you switch each pickup, individually, for standard series humbucker operation or parallel humbucker operation. Aditionally, not only can you coil tap, but you have the flexibility to choose whether you want the active coil or the slug coil to be tapped; this is not normally achieved with push/pulls. While the difference in the active/slug selection is subtle, if you have pickups where the coils have different windings, the effect can be pretty substantial. If you haven’t seen these out in the wild, here’s a shot of them so you can have some reference:
That pic doesn’t show the 2-wire pigtail that comes pre-wired from that little board and connects to the pots, but you’ll see it in the later diagrams, so don’t worry about it.
What neither of these switching arrangements allows is to have each pickup either in phase or out of phase with itself, which was an option I wanted. Worse yet, having the coil tap function on both the Triple Shot and the JP harness is, in a word, redundant and, therefore, hardly worth the effort. So the question I asked myself was how could I wire it all so that I keep all the functions I already had, add the ability to change the phase of each pickup unto itself AND make it easy to use. Some guys like rotary switches, but as I said earlier, they make me nuts.
Yes, this is the kind of shit that keeps me up at night. Fortunately for me, the solution turned out to be much easier than I initially suspected.
Reviewing the diagrams I’d made and acquired over the years, it was clear that the key was the phasing option for each individual pickup. I knew I had to be able to switch the phase of only one coil of each pickup, keep that signal isolated and then get that signal to pass through the Triple Shot and out the 2 wire connector to the pots. If I could lick that, I had the whole thing beat.
The simple solution then, was to keep the Triple Shots functioning as they come (they’re all multi-layered circuit boards, so changing their operation was not really an option anyway), and to change the push/pulls on the volume controls from coil taps to phase switches. I’d made both of these types of switches before, so this didn’t seem particularly difficult. I also had to figure out which wires on the JP harness connected the volume push/pulls to the other pots. Since these pots needed to be isolated for all of this to work and not bleed any signal when I didn’t want it to, those had to be disconnected. So, with that done, the trick would be to get the signal for one coil to switch and still have both coils work with the Triple Shot.
To that end, I figured out that I could wire 1 coil (I chose the active coil) to the Triple Shot board as it was meant to be, but wire the slug coil to its corresponding phase switch and then send the signal BACK to its respective place on the TS board. This required interrupting the stock pickup, 4 lead wire such that 2 wires (active coil) connected to the board and 2 wires for the slug coil went to the phase switch IN. I could then use the remaining wires on the interrupted leads to connect to the phase switch OUT and they would carry the signal BACK to the TS board. For that, I came up with this:
See? Sounds more complicated than it actually was. The hardest part, by far, was making that “X” connection on those little tabs. Absolutely maddening, but I got it done. TWICE, no less:
Fortunately, the phase switch on the bridge tone was pre-wired from Torres. Thank Heaven for small favors.
I tested everything for continuity, and so far, so good. Having conquered this stage, I decided that the best thing to do was move on to something a bit more mundane: Wiring the hot contacts from the jack to the selector switch and the volume pots. Not much to say here, so I’ll just show ya the diagram:
Easy peasy, right?
Since I had all the cables snaked into the cavity, and the most of the ground wires were already connected by Torres on the JP harness as it came, the next step was to connect the bare wires from the TS board harness to the pots, like so:
A word of advice here: while the grounds that are shown would likely have been sufficient for this of any other wiring scheme, I did not stop with this. When the wiring was eventually finalized and I connected the guitar bridge ground to one of the pots, I also ran a redundant ground to the bottom of each pot and another ground lead from one of the pots to the jack. If I’ve learned one thing in my years of doing wiring of electronics, particularly in automotive applications, all you need is one ground connection to go bad for any reason (cold solder joint, frayed wire, whatever) and the whole house of cards you’ve spent countless hours on can come tumbling down. Worse yet, you may never find the problem without some serious disassembly. I may garner some criticism for this, but a few well-placed redundant grounds, while they’re a pain in the ass and take time, believe me, they’re your very good friend. Not one of my guitars with any part of this whacky business I do has ever had a buzz, hum or click out of place. This is why.
So, what good is all of this if we don’t connect the pickups to the pots, right? Before you just “Well, I know how THAT goes” and dive in, though, you need to keep in mind that because of the series and phase options that will effect both pickups when they’re on together, the standard method of attaching the pickup leads to the volume pots is out of the question. For this scheme, you must be constantly mindful of the flow of the signal, particularly in series and out-of-phase operation. For these reasons, the hot lead from the neck pickup (in this case, from the TS board lead, actually; remember, we’re down to 2 leads at this point) must actually be split. The hot lead (white) goes to the center post on the neck volume pot itself and the black lead to the center post on the neck tone Push/Pull. This will allow the neck pickup to be, essentially, the first pickup in the series chain when that switching option is selected by pulling up on the neck tone knob. Subsequently, the two leads from the bridge pickup (again, actually from the bridge TS circuit board) are connected to the center posts of the bridge tone Push/Pull switch. This will allow the phase of the bridge pickup to be reversed when that knob is pulled up. Here’s how you do it:
Again, the execution is far easier than figuring it out, but if I can do it, you can, too.
At this stage, all that’s left is an examination of the series wiring which will allow the volume pots to work as Les Paul himself intended and allow all the other functions to play nice together. The good news for me was that this wiring was already done on the Torres JP harness and I didn’t have to figure any of it out; some hippies in California did that. Now you can benefit from it, too:
I recommend taking some time and tracing those leads, keeping in mind everything that was already done in the steps above. It’s really quite clever what these guys did. The best part is that because neither volume pot acts as a Master Volume; the blending options are, quite literally, infinite and the range of sounds available is staggering. A caveat applies here, however. Inherent in the series wiring is a situation where, when the series knob is pulled UP, the 3-way pickup selector will only work in the rhythm (neck) or middle positions and both pickups will be on in series. If you switch to the bridge pickup with the series switch UP, the guitar will go silent, so it works like a Kill Switch, which can come in handy. Not to fear, though; when the series switch is DOWN, the pickup selector and the guitar function normally.
So, I know what you’re thinking:
1. What’s it all look like when you’re done?
2. How does it work?
First question first. Take a look at this and you’ll understand why learning to diagram these things in layers with Photoshop is your friend and why it’s essential that I posted it in stages:
Second question, I think it’s great. Of course, this is highly subjective and the quality of the sounds and tones you can get will vary greatly depending on your guitar, choice of pickups, settings, how you cut your hair, what amp you use, your effects, playing style, you name it. With the exception of some redundancy in the phasing options while in sigle coil on both pickups, every option works in every combination, at least as many as I’ve been able to think of to this point. I’d be interested in hearing from some of you what you think might not work and then testing it to see what’s what. I do have to add, if it were ever true that you only need one guitar, believe me, boys and girls, this is The One.
On a closing note, I am aware that with all of these available switches there were any number of other options I could have selected to employ and that there are any number of ways to get many of the options I chose other than the switching system I wired up. At the end of the day, you have to choose which ones you like, what switches you can cope with, especially in a live performance environment. My guitar is, no doubt, a little complicated to use at first, but I’ve taken to it nicely and its ability to give me just about any tone I could want or need is unparalleled in a recording situation; I flick one or two switches and , BANG, there it is; I don’t even have to get up out of my chair. Dial it in with a little blending on the pots and you can do just about anything. Is it for everyone? Clearly not, but it’s for me.
Hope you enjoyed it. Feel free to ask questions, criticize, or just talk among yourselves about me behind my back.
It’s best to take what I did in stages, or it will be undecipherable, so I have to break it down a bit. First, a little background on what I was after. For my latest Les Paul, I wanted as many wiring options/sounds as possible, just because that’s how I am. After using the Seymour Duncan Triple shots in another guitar and based on my previous experience with the Jimmy Page wiring in a few other guitars, I wanted to find a way to mix the two together, as I figured this was the most effective way of getting everything in one axe. Besides, rotary switches drive me nuts and I already had these parts. Keep in mind that these diagrams are tailored for use with DiMarzio 4-wire pickups, so the color schemes may not match what everyone has. Finally, please keep in mind that a basic understanding of how DPDT mini-switches work is necessary here, or you’re going to get lost in all of this awfully quick.
To begin, I had already mixed the TS's and the JP Harness on one guitar and it works fine, but because the JP harness had already been wired in and the TS’s were added later, it required foregoing the coil tap function on the volume Push/Pulls. I wanted to avoid having useless Push/Pulls on this current Les Paul, so I came up with the idea of using the volume P/P's to handle phasing functions of the slug coils. I had a pre-wired Jimmy Page Harness from Torres Engineering which I was going to use as my starting point. As it comes, (for those who are unfamiliar) it allows you to use the volume knob push/pull knobs to coil tap its respective pickup. The push/pull on the neck tone knob would put the pickups in series with each other. The push/pull on the bridge tone would put the pickups out of phase with each other (it achieves this by switching the phase on the bridge pickup ONLY. This will be key much later on). The harness comes all wired, set and looks like this:
The fact that all the wires are either black or white can make you crazy at first, but Torres includes some really detailed diagrams so that all you have to do is attach the pickups and jack, and off you go. With a little patience, a magnifying hobby lamp and some determination, you can figure out how it’s assembled in about 15 minutes.
Next, the Seymour Duncan Triple shots (for those who aren’t familiar with them) contain 2 small switches in the pickup rings themselves, and a small, color coded circuit board. By attaching the pickups to the small board, you are left with only 2 wires to connect to the pot assemblies. The Triple Shots, as they come configured allow you switch each pickup, individually, for standard series humbucker operation or parallel humbucker operation. Aditionally, not only can you coil tap, but you have the flexibility to choose whether you want the active coil or the slug coil to be tapped; this is not normally achieved with push/pulls. While the difference in the active/slug selection is subtle, if you have pickups where the coils have different windings, the effect can be pretty substantial. If you haven’t seen these out in the wild, here’s a shot of them so you can have some reference:
That pic doesn’t show the 2-wire pigtail that comes pre-wired from that little board and connects to the pots, but you’ll see it in the later diagrams, so don’t worry about it.
What neither of these switching arrangements allows is to have each pickup either in phase or out of phase with itself, which was an option I wanted. Worse yet, having the coil tap function on both the Triple Shot and the JP harness is, in a word, redundant and, therefore, hardly worth the effort. So the question I asked myself was how could I wire it all so that I keep all the functions I already had, add the ability to change the phase of each pickup unto itself AND make it easy to use. Some guys like rotary switches, but as I said earlier, they make me nuts.
Yes, this is the kind of shit that keeps me up at night. Fortunately for me, the solution turned out to be much easier than I initially suspected.
Reviewing the diagrams I’d made and acquired over the years, it was clear that the key was the phasing option for each individual pickup. I knew I had to be able to switch the phase of only one coil of each pickup, keep that signal isolated and then get that signal to pass through the Triple Shot and out the 2 wire connector to the pots. If I could lick that, I had the whole thing beat.
The simple solution then, was to keep the Triple Shots functioning as they come (they’re all multi-layered circuit boards, so changing their operation was not really an option anyway), and to change the push/pulls on the volume controls from coil taps to phase switches. I’d made both of these types of switches before, so this didn’t seem particularly difficult. I also had to figure out which wires on the JP harness connected the volume push/pulls to the other pots. Since these pots needed to be isolated for all of this to work and not bleed any signal when I didn’t want it to, those had to be disconnected. So, with that done, the trick would be to get the signal for one coil to switch and still have both coils work with the Triple Shot.
To that end, I figured out that I could wire 1 coil (I chose the active coil) to the Triple Shot board as it was meant to be, but wire the slug coil to its corresponding phase switch and then send the signal BACK to its respective place on the TS board. This required interrupting the stock pickup, 4 lead wire such that 2 wires (active coil) connected to the board and 2 wires for the slug coil went to the phase switch IN. I could then use the remaining wires on the interrupted leads to connect to the phase switch OUT and they would carry the signal BACK to the TS board. For that, I came up with this:
See? Sounds more complicated than it actually was. The hardest part, by far, was making that “X” connection on those little tabs. Absolutely maddening, but I got it done. TWICE, no less:
Fortunately, the phase switch on the bridge tone was pre-wired from Torres. Thank Heaven for small favors.
I tested everything for continuity, and so far, so good. Having conquered this stage, I decided that the best thing to do was move on to something a bit more mundane: Wiring the hot contacts from the jack to the selector switch and the volume pots. Not much to say here, so I’ll just show ya the diagram:
Easy peasy, right?
Since I had all the cables snaked into the cavity, and the most of the ground wires were already connected by Torres on the JP harness as it came, the next step was to connect the bare wires from the TS board harness to the pots, like so:
A word of advice here: while the grounds that are shown would likely have been sufficient for this of any other wiring scheme, I did not stop with this. When the wiring was eventually finalized and I connected the guitar bridge ground to one of the pots, I also ran a redundant ground to the bottom of each pot and another ground lead from one of the pots to the jack. If I’ve learned one thing in my years of doing wiring of electronics, particularly in automotive applications, all you need is one ground connection to go bad for any reason (cold solder joint, frayed wire, whatever) and the whole house of cards you’ve spent countless hours on can come tumbling down. Worse yet, you may never find the problem without some serious disassembly. I may garner some criticism for this, but a few well-placed redundant grounds, while they’re a pain in the ass and take time, believe me, they’re your very good friend. Not one of my guitars with any part of this whacky business I do has ever had a buzz, hum or click out of place. This is why.
So, what good is all of this if we don’t connect the pickups to the pots, right? Before you just “Well, I know how THAT goes” and dive in, though, you need to keep in mind that because of the series and phase options that will effect both pickups when they’re on together, the standard method of attaching the pickup leads to the volume pots is out of the question. For this scheme, you must be constantly mindful of the flow of the signal, particularly in series and out-of-phase operation. For these reasons, the hot lead from the neck pickup (in this case, from the TS board lead, actually; remember, we’re down to 2 leads at this point) must actually be split. The hot lead (white) goes to the center post on the neck volume pot itself and the black lead to the center post on the neck tone Push/Pull. This will allow the neck pickup to be, essentially, the first pickup in the series chain when that switching option is selected by pulling up on the neck tone knob. Subsequently, the two leads from the bridge pickup (again, actually from the bridge TS circuit board) are connected to the center posts of the bridge tone Push/Pull switch. This will allow the phase of the bridge pickup to be reversed when that knob is pulled up. Here’s how you do it:
Again, the execution is far easier than figuring it out, but if I can do it, you can, too.
At this stage, all that’s left is an examination of the series wiring which will allow the volume pots to work as Les Paul himself intended and allow all the other functions to play nice together. The good news for me was that this wiring was already done on the Torres JP harness and I didn’t have to figure any of it out; some hippies in California did that. Now you can benefit from it, too:
I recommend taking some time and tracing those leads, keeping in mind everything that was already done in the steps above. It’s really quite clever what these guys did. The best part is that because neither volume pot acts as a Master Volume; the blending options are, quite literally, infinite and the range of sounds available is staggering. A caveat applies here, however. Inherent in the series wiring is a situation where, when the series knob is pulled UP, the 3-way pickup selector will only work in the rhythm (neck) or middle positions and both pickups will be on in series. If you switch to the bridge pickup with the series switch UP, the guitar will go silent, so it works like a Kill Switch, which can come in handy. Not to fear, though; when the series switch is DOWN, the pickup selector and the guitar function normally.
So, I know what you’re thinking:
1. What’s it all look like when you’re done?
2. How does it work?
First question first. Take a look at this and you’ll understand why learning to diagram these things in layers with Photoshop is your friend and why it’s essential that I posted it in stages:
Second question, I think it’s great. Of course, this is highly subjective and the quality of the sounds and tones you can get will vary greatly depending on your guitar, choice of pickups, settings, how you cut your hair, what amp you use, your effects, playing style, you name it. With the exception of some redundancy in the phasing options while in sigle coil on both pickups, every option works in every combination, at least as many as I’ve been able to think of to this point. I’d be interested in hearing from some of you what you think might not work and then testing it to see what’s what. I do have to add, if it were ever true that you only need one guitar, believe me, boys and girls, this is The One.
On a closing note, I am aware that with all of these available switches there were any number of other options I could have selected to employ and that there are any number of ways to get many of the options I chose other than the switching system I wired up. At the end of the day, you have to choose which ones you like, what switches you can cope with, especially in a live performance environment. My guitar is, no doubt, a little complicated to use at first, but I’ve taken to it nicely and its ability to give me just about any tone I could want or need is unparalleled in a recording situation; I flick one or two switches and , BANG, there it is; I don’t even have to get up out of my chair. Dial it in with a little blending on the pots and you can do just about anything. Is it for everyone? Clearly not, but it’s for me.
Hope you enjoyed it. Feel free to ask questions, criticize, or just talk among yourselves about me behind my back.
