PAF pickups 5 way switch

DailyDovetails

DailyDovetails

Well-known member
Me and my daughter are making a few kit guitars. Hers will be a somewhat modern styled bass and mine will be a headless guitar with a 25.5 scale. For pickups on mine I am wanting to use a set of 80's Tokai TWB-20 humbuckers that I got from a friend. I believe this particular set is modeled after a PAF as their output is about 7.9k and 8.1k. The guitar I am most comfortable playing currently is an Ibanez with high output Dimarzio pickups. I have it setup with a 5 way to do Neck, neck split, neck and bridge, neck and bridge as single coils parallel tele style, and bridge. I like this configuration as it gives me pretty good range single and humbucker distorted and clean sounds.

I don't have much experience with PAF style pickups especially with a split but I am thinking I want to use a 5 way super switch to do the following. neck, neck partial split(thinking of maybe wiring in a trimmer to get the split setup), neck and bridge, neck and bridge single coils series and bridge. It will have one tone and volume.

I'm expecting that this will give me a smaller range than my Ibanez but am hoping it doesn't give me any voices with unusable low volume or that are particularly thin. I'm hoping to have this guitar have a sound range that covers a very clean voice, a slightly dirty rock/blues voice and some jazz. Planning on using one tone and volume knob and possibly adding a switch to change phase between the neck and bridge pickups. If anyone has done something similar I would appreciate you advice/feedback.
 
Instead of neck split you can also consider wiring the neck in parallel which is a nice option to have IMO. This can also be done with a push/pull pot as an addition to the 5-way you’re planning.
Another option could be inner split (neck inner and bridge inner together) instead of neck and bridge in series or the outer coils splits. Inner and outer splits of both pickups are often wired with 5-way switches in positions 2 and 4.
 
harmaes said:
Instead of neck split you can also consider wiring the neck in parallel which is a nice option to have IMO. This can also be done with a push/pull pot as an addition to the 5-way you’re planning.
Another option could be inner split (neck inner and bridge inner together) instead of neck and bridge in series or the outer coils splits. Inner and outer splits of both pickups are often wired with 5-way switches in positions 2 and 4.
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It’s probably not a bad idea to try a few different things. I haven’t found success with the parallel position before but it’s always been on higher resistance pickups it might be worth revisiting with this set. I hadn’t considered the inner outer thing either. I think the PRS guitars are like that but I haven’t played one.

SillyOctpuss said:
Are they two wire or four wire humbuckers?
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They are 4 wire. Well more like will be as one is missing the wire. They look like distortions but the resistance is similar to PAFs. I guess they made these in a bunch of different configurations with the same backplates. Some look just like this but are in the 11-14k range.
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I had fun doing this for a two humbucker guitar, the switch on the right allows to switch from the neck north coil, both coils in parallel, both coils in series, south coil.
the one in the middle does the same for the bridge pickup.
the one on the left does this for the mix (bridge pickup only, both in parallel, both in series, neck pickup).
you just need three of these switches (SS-44D02-G10 4P4T Shorting 20 Pin Vertical Slide Switch) you can find them on ebay for cheap:
I can send you the gerber files if you want to get these made.
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thomasbe86 said:
I had fun doing this for a two humbucker guitar, the switch on the right allows to switch from the neck north coil, both coils in parallel, both coils in series, south coil.
the one in the middle does the same for the bridge pickup.
the one on the left does this for the mix (bridge pickup only, both in parallel, both in series, neck pickup).
you just need three of these switches (SS-44D02-G10 4P4T Shorting 20 Pin Vertical Slide Switch) you can find them on ebay for cheap:
I can send you the gerber files if you want to get these made.
Click to expand...
Those are very cool. I don't know that I would use them on this particular project but I could see eventually doing something like that on my Ibanez. It looks like there are a couple spots on the left where it could be jumped and sent to a blade type switch. I wonder if there is a 4 way blade switch that you could run wires right to the board with?

thomasbe86 said:
you can also dig these, I have one toggle 3+3 on a jazzmaster, this is killer : https://www.freewayswitch.com/products/
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Those are cool also. I actually have 2 guitars I could see rewiring with them. Thank you for the suggestions.
 
I had a 4 pole blade switch around with 5 positions, look up "Electroswitch Oak Grigsby 4 Pole Double Wafer Blade "Super" Switch 5 Position".
You could probably do the same, back then I had the fifth position to half out of phase parallel, just reversed + and - on one coil and added a cap (don't remember the value, but something around 22nF or so i guess) between the two coils. But honestly, on all these Frankenstein guitars, I always end up using one or two positions out of the gazillion possible 😅
 
thomasbe86 said:
I had a 4 pole blade switch around with 5 positions, look up "Electroswitch Oak Grigsby 4 Pole Double Wafer Blade "Super" Switch 5 Position".
You could probably do the same, back then I had the fifth position to half out of phase parallel, just reversed + and - on one coil and added a cap (don't remember the value, but something around 22nF or so i guess) between the two coils. But honestly, on all these Frankenstein guitars, I always end up using one or two positions out of the gazillion possible 😅
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I think the switch you mention might actually be the one I have. 1709683969722.jpeg
I’ve noticed that with myself as well. I built a HSH strat a few years ago that would kind of do all the parallel, series split positions but found myself mostly using either the neck or middle single coil. I like to have a few positions that vary with brightness and something clean and distorted at the flip of a switch but I don't like when there is a huge volume drop or it sounds thin, I rarely use the 2 or 4 position on a Strat but love the middle position in my dual p90 guitar go figure.
 
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