7 sounds! a simple mod
Welcome back! This week I’ve got a fun little mod that’s pretty simple to install as well as a quick ‘how to’ on pickup swaps. So first things first, let’s see what this puppy has under the hood.
Alright! Well if this just looks like colorful spaghetti to you, don’t worry, that’s all I see too. Well… ok, I kid. Let’s walk through it. Left to right we’ve got a five-way switch, master volume, DPDT switch, and a master tone. But what’s a five-way doing on a telecaster?! Settle down! This Tele has 3 pickups, so this totally makes sense. Even if you didn’t see the featured image for this post, you could tell that it’s got three pickups by counting the wires on the switch. There’s gotta be one output, and look where that blue wire goes: right to the master volume pot and then to the master tone, ok nailed it, output: check. That leaves two red wires and a yellow wire. The yellow wire goes straight to a hole coming from the neck pickup, and the middle red one goes to the middle pickup, how convenient! Even better, it looks like whoever wired this kept all the ground wires black, and they’re all in a “star grounding” (which just means they all go to the same place, it makes it easier to troubleshoot, but that’s for another post) arrangement on the back of the master volume, nice!
Ok, so the only wire left to identify on the switch is the far left red wire, and since we already found the neck and middle pickups, my money is on bridge pickup. But look! It’s going to the DPDT switch and then some weird stuff starts happening. Well we can safely assume that the fat black wire is coming from the bridge humbucker, and it’s got all four wires (or conductors if you prefer) accessible for modification. Remember that a humbucker is just two pickups, and each pickup has two wires coming out, two plus two…right! Without knowing the color code from the manufacturer, this kind of IDing can get tricky, but based on the simple arrangement of the switch, it’s pretty safe to assume that it’s a coil split, and it is. But the owner doesn’t like it! And he wants a whole new bridge pickup, so out it goes!
Alright, I just removed all the wires related to the bridge pickup so I can yank the thing out.
Where’d it go?!
Put that on eBay and then…
Oh my! Well that was painless. Now let’s take a look at how to wire it all back together and to make use of that free DPDT switch.
First things first, unbraid a section of the coaxial wire, remember why it’s the best? Ok then clip it down to an orderly arrangement.
Now we’re ready to put it all back together. Since we’re not doing any fancy pickup switching, the black signal wire can go straight to the 5-way switch and the braided shield can go to ground. I put it on the back of the master volume to keep with the star grounding, and I also put some shrink tubing over the whole thing to make sure it doesn’t accidentally short anything else. Then comes the simple mod!
So you can see the bridge pickup installed, and then I put the two white wires between the neck pickup and the output. This way, when the switch is up, the neck pickup is on, and when it’s down, it’s off. Super simple, but it’s cool when you’ve got just the bridge selected on the 5 way and you turn the neck pickup on. Now you’ve got bridge and neck without the middle pickup, just like a real tele. What’s more, in switch position two (bridge and middle) with the neck on, you’ve got ALL THREE PICKUPS ON!
And there you have it! Seven sounds and a quick and easy pickup swap. Have a nice rest of your week!