Rewinding a pickup by hand is an impossibly task in that it takes forever to unwind and rewind every coil. We're talking a couple of weeks of dedicated work here...

Unfortunatelly I was in a situation were I had to unwind and rewind a pickup that went dead.

Fortunatelly I thought of the Lego kits I have kept from my childhood (that wasn't so long ago) . I spent a couple of hours and eventually made a machine that would unwind the pickup unattended and would help me rewind the pickup quite fast. (see vid)

All it took was a multi-voltage adapter, a 9V lego electric motor, a couple of lego axls and gears, a big lego rim as temporary bobbin for the wire and some lego bricks.

Feeding the motor with only 3V made it turn slowly without enough power to break the wire in case the latter got stuck for any reason. This allowed me to let it work safely on its own for a some hours until the spot the wire was busted came to the surface.

After joining the broken ends and restoring continuity through the pickup, I switched the position of the bobbins and began rewinding the pickup. This part of the task I had to supervise and lead the wire onto the pickup bobbin. However I raised the voltage, accelerating the motor and speeding up the process.

I shot a short video of the winder in action:

This project includes woodwork and drilling.

DISCLAIMER: I'm talking about a cheap guitar, and a mod that gets the job done. I'm not talking about aesthetic perfection.

Also, the tools I use may shock people who strongly love their guitars.

The floating bridge (think Floyd Rose copy) on my first (and only) electric guitar (an Ibanez RG270DX) soon proved to be a nightmare. It never returned to zero point and every time I used it my tuning was then way off.

So I decided enough was enough, called up the Ibanez dealer and asked what sort of real Ibanez Edge bridges they had. The most affordable bridge of known quality available was a Lo Pro Edge, an older model, for $120 (now ibanez has redisigned their bridges, but that doesn't mean the old Edges are bad).

The first thing you'll notice if you take a Floyd (or a copy of one) and an Edge and compare them, is the profile. The floyds stick up away from the top of your guitar and require a minimal routing underneath them. The Edges have a low profile and need a much deeper routing underneath them.

But force-fitting is my middle name ;P .

I took out the old bridge and the soft mat covering the bottom of the routing and preserved it for re-usage. I used a hammer with an end for removing nails and used it to pull out the old stud anchors by keeping the studs well screwed into them and using the hammer nail-remover on them. I had to, because the new studs and anchors were larger in diameter.

The first to fix were the studs. With a drill safely smaller in diameter than the new stud anchors I enlarged the holes, both in diameter and in depth. Making the holes too wide would have been a very very bad thing. I favour using a hand-drill rather than a power-drill. It allows much better control and accuracy. There is no coming back if your powerdrill slips. Wood is not so hard to need a powerdrill anyway. When the holes were ready I hammered the new anchors in place and screwd in the studs. They had to be in place for me to be able to find the proper bridge position and modify the routing accordingly.

Then with primitive tools, a rasp and a razor knife, I widened the bridge routing to accomodate the bigger bridge and different arm holder design. That was easy. The hard part was to deepen the routing without having a router. I used chisels instead.Painstaking and rough job. When the cavity was deep enough so that the bridge could float freely and could even be pushed in a little, I padded the bottom of the routing with the old mat.

There was no reason to modify the spring cavity in anyway. I used the old claw.

When I was done routing, I painted the rooting the same color as the guitar. Since in my case it is black, I didn't bother about making it perfect. The bridge hides most of it anyway

The reward was great! I have never had any reason to complain about my bridge ever since I swapped it, two years ago.

I'm right handed and have played the guitar right-handed since day 1. But for a while now a big "what if" has been bugging me, triggered by the fact that most left-handed people play guitar right-handed

That, along with some people's comments about how lefties playing right-handedly have an advantage using their dominant hand on the fretboard, got me thinking: What if that is actually true? Considering how clumsy and slow my left hand is on the fretboard, I had to know if my dominant right hand could do a better job.

So I picked up an old classical guitar that was laying around unused and restrung it to be played left-handedly. And I have begun the slow process of teaching my left hand to pick and my right hand to fret.

The toughest part is at the very beginning, where each hand wants to use its muscle memory to execute the scheme dictated by the brain. Of course, since I was holding the guitar backwards, muscle memory was useless and getting in the way so the first thing to do was to overrule it. Granted I can still play right-handed, by every day my hands become freer from the bonds of their past roles and I think I have almost gotten to point blank, where I can start teaching them the new roles.

I'm wondering now, as a new beginner, if I should take the quick "noodle-around" way I took when learning guitar for the first time, or if I should focus on doing it slowly and by the book and taking the time to complete every step of the process instead of rushing to the next one... I know you'll advise the second one, but it has one disadvantage (other than my lack of patience): the comparison between my left and right -handed playing will be compromised as I won't be able to tell if the difference is due to proper training, or natural dominance or both.

Another issue that freaks me out a little is, what am I gonna do with my righty guitars if I turn out to play better left-handedly? That is a question I have not answered yet. Granted I will be able to play it, but what is the point of keeping "righty" gear if I'm better at playing leftily? And there's more to it. I like all four of my guitars and 3 of them were opportunities I'm not gonna have again. Plus selling them won't get me my money back, not even close.

A thing I have considered is to keep playing righty and possibly learn how to play a righty guitar lefthandedly without restringing it, for when I want to do something beyond my righthanded playing abilities... Or I could take the time to train my left hand until it becomes as agile as the right, or maybe more... but I don't have the patiente.
Of course you wonder how come I have the patience to learn to play guitar all over again, but I don't have the patiente to fix my already gained skill. Well, I have more patiente for learning something new than for correcting what's already there... Maybe I should spend a little of my time correcting my left hand's fretting skill.

You have a guitar with a given range of tones and you want to get more out of it.

You can achieve quite a bit by redesigning the circuit inside the guitar. It may sound baffling at first but it really isn't that hard.

My goal here is to provide you with some ideas and instructions on how to achieve different sounds, by changing the ways your pickups are combined. Diagrams are included, but they are local diagrams, so that you can integrate them in bigger schemes.

The basics of a pickup

In order to understand how to use a pickup, you must first understand the pickup itself. I strongly advise you to take a look at the physics book of highschool, in the chapter about electricity and magnetism. In short, changes in the electric current flowing through a wire generate a magnetc field and vice versa a changing magnetic field generates electric current in a wire. The first scenario is called an electromagnet. A guitar pickup belongs to the second scenario. Also, some materials distort the shape of a magnetic field

In it's most basic form, a pickup is a single-coil pickup, which consists of two things: a coil (wire wound around a bobbin) and a magnet. The magnet generates a steady magnetic field. When a metalic string vibrates in this field, it distorts the field's shape back and forth. This change in the magnetic field generates alternate current in the coil, which is then sent to an amp for amplification and playback. In reality though, the magnet is usually found at the bottom of the coil and the magnetic field is carried through the core of the coil and focused on the strings with the help of metal rods or blade that go(es) through the core of the coil.

Of course there is a wiki entry too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick_up_(music_technology) 

3 basic properties affect how a pickup behaves in the presence of other pickups:

1. The polarity of the magnet (north/south) determines the polarity of the magnetic field. If two pickups have magnets with opposing polarities, they will tighten the field between them and it will seriously affect how they respond to the string. The rule that works is that all pickups have the same magnetic polarity. This is something you probably won't ever have to worry about.
2. The electrical polarity of the coil. It can be wound mostly clockwise or mostly counter-clockwise. Polarity matters for the humbucking effect. Two coils with opposing polarities cancel out low frequencies, like the 50-60Hz hum. A humbucker pickup concists of two such coils. Single coils exist in both types of polarity, for use in the middle position of 3 single-coil guitars.
3. The electrical phase of the coil. Usually you want you pickups to have the same phase. Opposing phases cancel each other out and in result only some high frequencies escape, making your sound very low in volume and very thin.The phase of a pickup working all alone doesn't matter. It is only important when multiple pickups are active at the same time.
   

The electric phase is practically the only thing you can affect through wiring. The polarities require radical intervention to the pickup itself and will not be discussed here.

Basic pickup wiring

In it's basic form, the pickup is a single coil and has two ends. In all electric circuits one end is connected to a "ground"/"cold" spot and the other end is the "hot" and useful portion of the signal. Good pickups have a third wire, usually a bare one. This one is also grounded but is not part of the signal-making process. It is a "shield", grounding the metallic parts of a pickup (bolts, magnets, polepieces) to prevent static electricity from building up on the pickup and affecting your signal.

A humbucker is essentially two single coils joined together like the wagons of a train: The cold end of the first coil is joined to the hot end of the second coil. These two coils have opposing electrical polarities. However humbuckers on the market today usually don't have only two wires (plus shield). Sometimes there is a third wire, giving direct access between the coils, so that you can bypass one or the other. More commonly though, humbuckers are sold with 4 wires coming out (plus shield). No, it's not more complex, it's actually more simple: the coils are not joined at all, giving you full control over how to use the pickup.

Basic controls on a guitar

There are two types of controls found on guitars: pots and switches.

• Pots are essentially variable resistors. They make use of electricity's property to prefer the path of least resistance. Two types of pot controls are common: the volume control and the tone control. They both rely on the tendency of electricity to seek a path from hot to ground. If at any point other than the pickup coil itself, the hot path and the cold path meet under ANY circumstances, the result will be that there will be no hot signal at all. That's a short-circuit (except there is nowhere near enough voltage to cause a fire.

The volume control offers two alternatives to your hot signal: hot vs. cold, separated by a resistor. With the volume wide open, the resistor prevents the signal from crossing over to the cold end. When you turn the volume down, the resistance between the signal and the cold is reduced and part or all of your signal shorts out.

The tone control is an alternative route instead of the volume control. It too offers a path for your signal to short out. Except that there is a capacitor that only allows high frequencies to short out. Higher capacitor values increase the frequency range that is allowed to short out. With the tone wide open, the maximum resistance between hot and cold is ensured so that the treble is not lost.

It becomes evident that the amount of resistance the pots have, affects the strength and brightness of your signal. Higher resistance values give a brighter and more powerful signal/sound.

• Switches are, well, switches. Typically they switch between the available hot sources (pickups), allowing one or several of them to be active. Any pickup or coil that doesn't have both its cold and hot side simultaneously connected to the output jack, will not contribute to the signal. With humbucker pickups it is common for switches to deliberately short out one of the humbucker's coils in certain switch positions. This is known as coil splitting or coil tapping. When a humbucker is split, it functions like a single coil. In more complex situations, switches handle more complex hot/cold activations and occasionally they may even be used to shuffle hot and cold connections (effectively reversing the electrical phase of a pickup/coil).

This is roughly how a blender switch works:

Putting the pieces together

You can find instructions on common wiring schemes at the sites of major pickup manufacturers (ie. DiMarzio, Seymour Duncan, ...). Different manufacturers use different color codes for the wires so it is important to consult the right diagrams. Even so, requests for wiring schemes that are not available or are slightly different than the ones available at the manufacturers' sites keep showing up. This article's goal is to help you be able to add the individual details that make your case not match exactly one of the available schemes and set you on your way to making your own schemes from scratch.

NEVER FORGET THAT:

(a) Electricity will always follow the path of least resistance between hot and cold. This means it may even go "backwards" in a cable, so always treat your wires as two-directional roads. No wire is a one-way so don't fall in the trap of assuming they are, otherwise you'll likely get bleed-throughs and short-outs that will mess with your signal and with your head.

(b) It doesn't matter (much) where you branch your signal. The following are all (ideally) equivalent:

Some common setups explained

Before we increase complexity, let's make sure that you understand what the common basic schemes are about.We'll see 3 examples: the 3 single coil (S-S-S) strat-style, the humbucker - single coil - humbucker (H-S-H) superstrat-style and the humbucker - humbucker (H-H) lespaul-style. you can find diagrams for these all over the internet. Here I've made my own and highlighted the key features. Things that may be left unexplained in one of them will be better explained in one of the other two.

S-S-S

The pickups are in their simplest form, a single coil each.

Switching is performed by a 5-way blender switch. In positions 1, 3, 5 you get one pickup respectively. Position 2 = 1+3 and 4 = 3+5. In both cases the pickups are activated in parallel with each other. Since all pickups have their cold end grounded, they are all also in phase with each other (we'll discuss this later). 

A single master volume controls the signal.

The neck and middle pickups have each their own tone control. Since the tone controls must apply to specific pickups only, the controls' hot sides must come from the pickups BEFORE the signals are blended with each other at the switch. Generally anything that is pickup-specific goes before the switch. Therefore here, we draw the hot line for the tone controls right before the pickup signals are blended. The tone controls share the same capacitor.

Often the middle pickup will have a reverse polarity compared to the other two. Therefore positions 2 and 4 will be humbucking. This doesn't change anything about how the wiring looks like.

H-S-H

Here the tone control is a global one. Therefore it draws its hot line AFTER the switch, where the signals are now blended. The volume is global as previously.

The middle pickup is exactly as would be found on an S-S-S setup, minus the individual tone control.

The two humbuckers are each internally serially connected and function like a single pickup each. The "purple" wires represent the coil splitters, one per humbucker. These are used to bypass one of the two coils, so that in positions 2 and 4 you get two coils working instead of 3.

The 5-way switch has one pole wired as in a S-S-S setup. The 2nd pole activates the splitters. The coil that finds itself with both ends hot or both ends cold is turned off. Since a humbucker's two coils have opposite polarities, choosing the right coil to split to will allow you to achieve humbucking properties in positions 2 and 4 in combination with the middle pickup. However, since only one of the coils is connected to the switch, it makes sense to keep this one active instead of the other. Since that coil has its hot side taken care off, the splitters must provide the cold path. If this setup hums, there are some more changes that must be done other than switching the splitters from cold to hot.

H-H

Here we have two humbuckers that typically don't split. Each pickup has its own volume and tone. As such, both the volume and tone controls come BEFORE the (single-pole) 3-way blender switch.

The tone controls here are set to use each its own capacitor. This way you can choose different capacitance values for the two pickups (remember, the capacitance affects the frequency range that is cut).

Hopefully this gave you enough of an understanding of basic connections of the components for you to also understand the next sections, concerning mods. Many common mods are basically the insertion of extra controls between the existing ones. This allows achieving more types of connections, but each individual connection will have to be in the spirit of what has been described in the sections above.

Let's look at few simple mods to get your brain and your imagination working.

"Blow" switch

The blow switch is the simplest mod. It is used on guitars with 3 pickups and its goal is to activate all 3 pickups, an option not available through a conventionally wired 5-way blender switch.

In order to activate all 3 pickups, we must provide a path for the hot side of each of them to reach the global hot point. This can be achieved in several ways, but the most efficient one is also the best one. Instead of thinking about how to activate all 3 pickups, you can think about it differently: at least one pickup will be already active anyway. All you have to so then is find a way to re-route the hot path of the other 2 pickups onto the path of the active pickup.

For this we use a double-pole double-throw (DPDT) switch, like the ones found in push/pull pots (yes, you are required to replace one of your pots with a push/pull pot. These pots are the most common way of adding a switch without altering the guitar).

When the switch is down, the re-routes are all cut. When the switch is pulled up, the signal from each pickup is re-routed to all of the switch's positions at once, effectively bypassing the switch and activating all 3 pickups.

The result is a more wide-spread sound.

Neck-Bridge with a 5-way

One of the things that has bugged me on an H-S-H guitar is that by using positions 2, 3 and 4 to achieve more strat-like sounds by using the middle pickup, I can't get the sound of the two humbuckers together like on an H-H setup.

With a DPDT (or SPST, single-pole double throw) switch this can be achieved in the same way the blow switch works. Except that the middle pickup is not included this time. A cool side-effect is that at positions 2 and 4 you will have all 3 pickups and at position 4 you will still only have the middle single coil.

Ditching the middle pickup

If you ever feel you don't want the middle pickup and want to keep only the neck and bridge pickups, simply removing the pickup will suddenly make position 1 = 2 and 4 = 5 and position 3 will be silent. Now that is not very useful. This is how I turned my 5-way into a 3-way: 1=neck, 5=bridge, 2,3,4=1+5.

Alternatively, you can move either 5 or 1 and connect it on 3. This will free up 1 or 5 respectively which will then be silent. You can use it to "turn off" the guitar instead of turning the volume down or maybe to simulate a kill-switch ala Buckethead. I find it a bit awkward when the neck is not at 1 and the bridge is not at 5 with intermediate sounds between them.

Series/coil splitting switch

H-S-H guitars have this integrated in positions 2 and 4 in order to maintain the humbucking quality. If the humbuckers weren't split, you'd have 3 coils in operation and odd numbers of coils are generally not humbucking.

Installing a switch for coil tapping allows you to use your humbuckers as single coils, without depending on the presence of a middle pickup and a 5-way switch. It allows you to use the humbuckers as single coils even on their own. This gives a brighter, less powerful and more focused sound. It won't be humbucking though.

The concept is essentially the same as coil splitting with the 5-way. There's a splitter that gets activated when you pull up the knob. With a DPDT switch you can coil tap both humbucker at once.

Alternatively you can leave the two coils disconnected, and connect them only through the switch. This, however requires both sides of the DPDT. It may prove useful to know both ways.

Series/parallel switch

Alternatively to splitting a humbucker to get a brighter quieter sound, you can also get a brighter and quieter sound (not as quiet and focused as the single coil mode) by wiring the humbucker's coils in parallel. This (unlike coil tap) is still humbucking. You need a DPDT for each humbucker for this one.

As an extension to this line of thought, you can wire any two(or more) pickups in series with each other, whether they are single coils or humbuckers.

Phase switching

Reverse phase produces a tiny, very thin and low in volume sound. The closer the pickups that are out of phase are with each other, the tinier the sound will be. I find that this type of sound goes well in indie styles or for some really retro blues sounds. You can reverse the phase of an entire pickup so that the effect kicks in when you use it in combination with another pickup, or if you have a humbucker you can treat it as two individual pickups and wire it out of phase internally (for ultra puny sound).

Just like any situation in which more than one coil are involved, you can wire the pickups/coils in series (stronger) or in parallel (weaker).

To reverse the phase of a pickup/coil, the hot side most become cold, and the cold side must become hot, hence the "X" shaped cross-connection on the DPDT switch.

Pickups in series

Owners mainly of 3-single coil guitars occasionally want to beef up their sound. One way is to replace the pickups with half-sized humbuckers but that's an expensive mod and the pickup market is vast and confusing. A cheap alternative is to use an extended 5-way switch in order to be able to configure each position independently of the others and connect the existing pickups serially in positions 2 and 4 instead of parallel.

There is some serious change in perception needed for this to work. Instead of using the 5-way to turn on different pickups like in normal parallel configuration, we will use it as a mega split-controller. The 3 coils are connected serially with each other, forming a "train" that is always on. Two splitters are inserted between the 3 pickups. By setting the splitters to hot or cold, we can isolate different portions of the pickup "train", namely one or two pickups at a time.

Ultra mode-switching (requires altering the guitar or the pickguard)

For the sake of demonstrating some megalo-mania, here is some wicked mode switching. The modes are all discussed in the sections above. Instead of using a vast and confusing array of push/pull pots and mini switches, I have installed a 4-pole 5-way on my guitar. It is an intrusive mod and it will lower the value of your guitar so don't do it if you have a nice guitar. The 4-pole 5-way provides an ideal tool for performing multiple tasks with a single move, which allows gathering all the modes of operation mentioned above to a single control.

Each humbucker has the hot side of one coil sent to a normal 5-way blender switch and the cold side of the other coil sent to the global ground point. Instead of joining the remaining two wires to form the serial connection, the wires are sent to the 4-pole switch where their fate can be controled.

• In position 5: both humbuckers are internally in serial mode via jumper connections across poles. Like in the final option of coil splitting discussed earlier.
• In position 4: both humbuckers are split. Since their intermediate wires are not joined, all I have to do is leave one completely disconnected and send the other to ground to keep active the coil that is on the blender switch.
• In position 3: the other coil is kept active instead, by sending the intermediate wire to hot. Since this coil is not connected to the blender switch and the coil that is connected to the blender switch is inactive, we still need a way to control if we want the bridge or neck. So instead of connecting directly to hot, we're connecting to the blender switch instead.
• In position 2:  both humbuckers are now internally set in parallel, by simply combining the previous two configurations.
• In position 1: Well... nothing is happening here really. It is an "off" position, since the humbuckers are internally disconnected. Well, not entirely true... The middle pickup will still be accessible since it is unaffected by what I'm doing on the humbuckers.

In past implementations of the ultra mode controller I've used position 1 for various things. For example, phase switching of a humbucker. This is not possible in the layout discussed here because I need two poles of the switch exclusively for phase control. If I didn't want the parallel connection of position 2, I could instead implement coil splitting through splitter wires, which requires half the number of poles, thus freeing up two for phase control. It's basically a choice between phase control or parallel operation. Only one or the other can be implemented on the switch with the other options uncompromised.

More insanity

• The middle pickup get's it's own individual volume control and is removed from the blender switch. I can thus turn it on anytime regardless of what the humbuckers are doing.
• Similarly, the two humbuckers share a volume control independently of the middle pickup.
  
• The 5-way blender is modded to work like a 3-way blender like described earlier.
• Phase of the bridge humbucker is controlled by a push/pull DPDT. No matter if the humbucker is serially or parallelly connected or split to either side, whatever is active gets phase-reversed.

Here I present two ways: One with help of software (very efficient) and one with no need for either a computer or a guitar.

The software is the following one, suggested to me by another Gdotcom member:

Downloading and installing the program shouldn't take more than seconds on broadband. It's very compact. And it's essentially free.

So instead of me filling long pages of text, I suggest you spend a few hours a week with this program until you know them all.

It's essentially the same idea as the following, but way more practical:

(DISCLAIMER: a whole bottle of rum is hardly a good idea in general, especially when you need a clear focused mind)

You'll realize the program is pretty straight to use. You can isolate and learn the notes per string or per fret or all together. Whichever way you do it, I guarantee you you'll have them down pretty soon.

Practice Tips: A smart way to approach this is to minimize possibilities: If you memorize only the 7 natural notes, the remaining 5 notes are very easy to find.

So, isolate one string at a time (E,A,D,G,B,E), then do them in pairs (EA,DG,BE) then in triplets (EAD,GBE). To make sure you have them down well, then isolate groups of frets: (0-2-3-5, 5-7-8,8-10-12) and practice them across all strings. The frets suggested are not random. They are either "dotted" frets (easy to spot) or consist primarily of natural notes (no sharps/flats). Finally activate all frets and strings. The above procedure contains redundancy in favour of complete beginners. IMPORTANT: try to name the note pointed to you BEFORE even looking at the buttons below to select your answer. The nature of the program and options often causes querry notes to be adjacent and you can reply correctly just by counting steps instead of really recalling what note is there. Cheating like that will only delay your progress.

Once you're able to name quickly any note pointed to you on the fretboard, there is still one little thing to do and it's important. You'll notice that if I ask you to give me all the locations of an "F" (or any other note) you'll probably hesitate a little. In order for your knowledge to be complete and confident you need to do the opposite practice: For each of the 7 natural notes practice quickly finding all its locations on the fretboard.

After you're done with both of these practice routines you're ready to confidently conquer the world of scales and chords.

All in all I think if you dedicate one day you'll master it.

BONUS: Additionally, this program has a section with scales and chords. It is not the most complete but it sure is enough to get you jump-started.

BUT you can practice the notes away from a computer or a guitar:

When your mind is idling (ie in the bus, at a red traffic light, while in the shower etc) picture a fretboard with your mind. Restrict yourself to frets 0 through 12.

Now, choose a note and VISUALIZE all the positions yu can find it on the fretboard. if you don't visualize it, you won't be able to recall that knowledge when you hold an actual guitar in your hands. Eye-memory (picture) is much quicker and more efficient than general memory (words). If you have time to choose a second note as well, make it one that is not directly adjacent to the previous one.

Other things you can do, pick a fret and think of which notes are located there. Or pick a string and find which notes are on which frets.

The advantage of this is that your knowledge of the notes becomes independent from your finger memory and you save practice time while making something useful out of mentally idle moments.

This method,however, has one prerequisite: you have to have understood how a guitar is tuned, how the notes are spaced and how that spacing translates to guitar, in order to be able to find where the notes are. Here's a short review of that knowledge.

Long story short, the natural notes are A_BC_D_EF_G_A in that order and spacing . Every typed character (letter or underscore) represents a semitone.This means A is a whole tone's worth far from B, while B is only a semitone away from C. "_" represent semitones whose note occurs by adding accidentals to the natural ones. The _ between A and B is A# or Bb. The reason I like to show the notes this way is that it helps visualize the notes on the fretboard. Each fret is also worth one semitone. On the 5th (A) string of a guitar the natural notes, in the order mentioned above, will fall on frets 0,2,3,5,7,8,10,12.

With good practice you can have it all down in little time!

- RG -

You have probably heard of the so called "Circle of 5ths". Consult Captain Fantastic's blog for some info on it:

http://www.guitar.com/greighgripearce/blog/the_circle_of_fifths

So why am I making this blog, if the 5ths have already been discussed?

To point out some "rules" behind the concept of the circle that will hopefully help you memorize it and recall and use it easily.

So I created what I call the "Star of Fifths" . It is a stripped down version of how the Circle of 5ths is usually presented.

The notes are laid around in a circle, exactly as is the case with the circle of fifths. But I display the info differently.

I don't overlay the relative minor keys as they are redundant and make it seem like you have to memorize more than you actually need to. Instead, I draw an arrow from one major key to it's relative minor. Doing so, revealed that 3 rectangles are formed. Reading clockwise within any one of the rectangles, each point is the relative minor key of the preceding point (functioning as a major key). This also organizes the notes in 3 groups of 4 notes easy to memorize and recall. No need to pull the entire Circle from your memory to find a relative minor key. All you need is the appropriate rectangle.

The other thing I do differently is the use of flats and sharps. Lower complexity makes things easier to grasp. So I display everything as natural notes or sharps of them. No flats. We're trying to get a basic hold on things, not get admitted to a philharmonic orchestra ;-P Plus it makes it easier (for me) to memorize. Go ahead and display them as you think it best helps you. I provide a flats version further below. But finding the flats when you know the sharps is easy.

I'm showing here the Circle with flats as well. I'm also adding the two "missing" sharps from the order of sharps, which I omitted purposedly in the first Star. The notes are the same, it's only the name that changes. Personally, I could live with just the first version of the Star.

An interesting thing about the Circle of Fifths is shown in the following image. Although the note (say F#) on the opposite side of the circle from a given note (say C) has no significant meaning, the notes flanking it have. Counterclockwise is the Cb and clockwise it is the C#, This is true for all 12 notes displayed on the circle. This may help you remember the Circle and fill in the blanks. Captain Fantastic's blog (link top of this page) has another mnemonic rule for remembering the order in which notes are layed along the circle.

Two things you need to know about how the Cicle is built:

1) Immediately ounter-clockwise of each note you'll find the 4th of its major scale and immediately clockwise of it you'll find the 5th of it's major scale. Blues,pop,rock,country songs often rely on those 3 chords a lot.

A result of the above is the order in which the notes of a major key are organised. Reading clockwise the order is "4th root 5th 2nd 6th 3rd 7th". You'll need this when you look for 3rd or 7th etc in a certain key. It will be easier to remember if you note that it consists of '4567' intersected with '123' to produce "4152637" . The minor key looks more scrambled: "6 3 7 4 root 5 2" (strictly that would actually be "b6 b3 b7 4 root 5 2" in proper terms, because notes are typically always numbered after the major key of the same root).

2) The third note clockwise of any given major key root, is the root for its relative minor key (the minor key with the exact same notes as the given major key). Backwards, the third note counterclockwise of any given minor key root, is the root for its relative major key.

A few examples on reading the star:

1) Finding the relative minor key: The relative minor of Cmaj is Amin, as indicated by the arrow linking these two. The relative minor key of Amaj is F#min. The relative minor of F#maj is D#min. Finally, the relative minor of D#maj is Cmin, and thus the first rectangle is formed.

2) Finding the notes of any major key: Starting one note counter-clockwise from the root note, read clockwise 7 notes. These are the notes in your scale. For Cmaj this translates into: F, C, G, D, A, E, B. Put in order they are CDEFGAB(C).

For Amaj that means: D,A,E,B,F#,C#,G# and in the proper order: ABC#DEF#G#(A)

Using the 4152637 rule you can put them in order quickly or directly retrieve any specific one note out of a specific key.

3) Finding the notes of any minor key:
Trace the arrow backwards to the relative major key.
The notes in the relative major key are exactly the same as in the minor key you're after. Look at the previous example on how to find the notes of a major key.

So the notes for Amin are all the same as the notes for Cmaj, but ordered to start on A.

The correct order rule here is 6 3 7 4 root 5 2 for the aeolian (natural minor) scale.

4) Finding the 5th and 4th in a given key: The 4th and 5th of a key are very popular in blues and rock (and not only) when building chord progressions.
In a given key (say C) the 4th is found immediatelly on its counterclockwise side (here it is F) and the 5th is found immediatelly on its clockwise side (here it is G).

Enjoy!

- RG -

Yup. Windows Movie Maker proved very easy to use and my new supercheap webcam proved able to shoot damm decently when properly focused and with proper lighting.

So here it is!

Slide guitar is one of those highly cherished styles that few people dare to venture in. It is also one that can be very frustrating to figure out on your own. My own first attempts where pathetic until I saw Eric Sardinas on a youtube.com video and it all suddenly made sense.

TUNING

While you can slide on any tuning, things will come a lot easier if you start on an open tuning like open D (D A D Gb A D) or open G (D G D G B D). I use open G because the 4th, 3rd and 2nd strings are the same as on a standard tuning (e a D G B e), so it is easier to relate one to another.

If you want tunings like open E or open A you should tune to open D or G respectively and use a capo. Otherwise you'll put too much tension on the neck and strings.

The reason it is easier to start with an open tuning, is that the guitar is tuned to a major chord. Because of this, any feedbacking notes from strings you don't mean to play, will sound in tune and will add to the whole sound. With a different tuning, feedback will be out of tune, causing a mess. I use a short slide to eliminate this effect.

One very important thing to remember and take advantage of when you play in an opening tuning is that the intervals between strings are different from string to string. D - G is a 4th, G - D is a 5th, G - B is a maj3rd and B - D is a min3rd.

On the plus side, you can form major and minor feels by playing different strings (despite the fact you are tuned to a major chord).

On the "minus" side, the same pattern played on different strings will sound radically different. The same notes played across different strings will also sound different, because the ambient notes produced by the slide will be different and may be in or out of key, depending on which strings you use.

This means you have to make good use of the entire length of the fretboard, since different positions for the same notes have unique properties, unlike a standard tuning, where most string intervals are a 4ths

STRINGS

As you'll hear in the video, string buzz is produced when moving the slide. If you use heavy strings, you can try lighter strings but it limits the useability of your first string, which becomes too flimsy (I use regular gauge 10: almost too light for acoustic guitar). Generally thicker strings will sound better, if you can handle the buzzing. Don't try to use flatwound strings. They are too lifeless.

SLIDES

There are some types of slides and materials they are made of.

Traditionally slides consisted of bottlenecks. Making one is risky though, so I strongly suggest you visit your local store and buy a slide instead of making your own. There are different glass and metal slides out there, in different lengths, diameters and thicknesses.

What you should consider is the size of your fingers. Don't get a slide much larger than your finger or you won't be able to control it.

Glass slides are more lightweight and have a distinctly different tone than metallic ones. If you play electric guitar, you'll appreciate them more. On an acoustic guitar I find that they lack sustain and volume.

There are metallic slides that are thin and lighweight and sound quite like the glass ones.i.e the wedge-shaped one in my pic.

Brass slides are big, thick and heavy. They have the most sustain and volume, they can handle thick strings, but they are cumbersome to use if you have thin small hands. Notice how in the last tune in the video I keep accidentally hitting it against the fretboard.

SLIDE-FINGER

So which finger should you wear the slide on?

I suggest your pinky as the best cadidate. It leaves three fingers free behind the slide to mute string overtones or fret notes, which makes overall playing sound nicer.

One can argue you can put the slide on your index and use the three fingers ahead of it to fret notes. It probably sounds cool too, but none of my slides fits on my index so I haven't tried it. The minus point here is that you can't mute the strings behind the slide.

Using the middle finger is something I advise against. It is the longest finger, so it will be awkward to cover all 6 strings, and it will make all your other fingers useless for fretting.

The only alternative I'm open to is using a half-length slide on the ring finger. With practice, this allows you to have all 4 fingers available for fretwork. In this case I wear the slide on the middle segment of the finger.

SLIDE and NOTES

On a fretboard, the notes are located directly over the frets.

It is confusing, because you are probably used to thinking of notes as them being between frets, which is where you place your fingers. But when you put your finger behind a fret, it is the fret that actually produces the note.

So when you use a slide, you have to seek the notes directly over the frets to get the proper pitches.

Oh and don't push the slide down too much. You don't want the strings to contact the frets. The slide has taken up the role of producing the notes now. This will be easier to accomplish if you play a guitar with high action.

A good tactic, to make your slide playing sound more true, is NEVER to place the slide directly over the target fret. Even when you're not transitioning from a previous note, always try to "sneak up" to the note by sliding up or down to it. This also helps you as it allows you to stop when your ear detects the proper pitch has been reached. Laying the slide directly over the fret is prone to producing slightly wrong pitches.

This is why in the tabs I provide, you'll often see a note in parentheses (not to be picked) preceding a slide-up to a note.

****************

TABS for the VIDEO

Be sure to view them zoomed somehow, otherwise it is not always clear what's written.

Legend:

/ , \ : slide up , down

(...) : Not picked. Ambient or sustained notes.

F : Fingered note

sliiide or sss : played with the slide

___| or ~~~ : sustained with the slide

b... : bend to target note

p... : pull off to target note

CHAPTER ONE (B):

The slide is initially positioned in a very angled position, in a way that it meets the three strings over frets, so that a chord is formed (Bb maj). Very tricky to get 100% and sustain it. But the trick is not to spend any time on it. Instead I slide directly back to solid ground (F maj). The result from the different slide intervals is pretty nice, even though I didn't do it justice in the video.

BTW: This is definitely not something you need to worry about learning right away. I only showed it to you to help you think "outside the box" .

CHAPTER TWO :

I was trying to see what certain tunes sound like when played with slide instead. The beginning of the solo of smoke on the water struck me as a nice playing around with the 2nd and 3rd strings.

To keep things simple, I use no fingers here. But, I do lift the slide a little, either for a staccato effect (to sound more like the original tune) or to move elsewhere. Try not to drag the slide on the strings for every transition you make.

CHAPTER THREE:

This is the same tune I put as music over the opening title of the video. Except I played it better the first time.

The idea is that I slide up to a note (chord) and while I still sustain it with the slide, I use a finger behind the slide to fret an other note.

Moving the slide back to get that note (like I do in the "Smoke on the Water" part) would create a different effect, as it would move the sustained note along. I want to keep the sustained note to its pitch and still add a note from a different fret. That's where the fingers come in handy and why you shouldn't play slide in a way that renders them useless.

CHAPTER FOUR :

Structured as a 12 bar I-IV-V in the key of G in 4/4 timing.

It goes rather fast, but in the video I have added a slowed-down version of it as well.

I try to play both rythm and lead and well, it's evident to the pros that I slip in a couple of spots. As a beginner I suggest you try to get the leads alone. The rythm doesn't have anything special about it.

I came up with this tune just recently looking for something suitable to end this lesson with. I have since remade the video and tab to fix errors.

NOTE: if it doesn't say "s" over the tab, it is not played with the slide. This tune demonstrates why you should wear the slide on your pinky and keep the other fingers available for fretting.

First two 2 bars:

For the next two bars, I sneak in some warm up slide fills:

Now we move to the "IV" for two bars. The fills are more or less the same pattern:

Back to I:

Now the "V"-"IV" drop. Watch out for the fingered notes:

Ok, that's it!

One last TIP: Noodle around along the guidelines I gave you. Explore what types of sounds you can get by using different strings and frets, always in relation to you open root. Try to create short licks, just a few notes each, each implementing just one idea, and gradually build up a library of such licks. By stringing those licks together in various ways you'll be able to play quite satisfactorily. Tab them out or tape them down if you are prone to forgetting.

Enjoy!

- RG -

 Skype me :)

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It is good to have the electric stringed up and ready to roll again after a whole week !

As hard as it is for me to believe it, I had left one end of the bridge pickup completely unhooked and evidently the pickup didn't make any sound unless it was split to the other coil. The loose lead was hiding out of sight behind the mega-switch that is the heart of my system. Hadn't it been for getting my voltmeter back online I wouldn't have known for quite a while more...So the diagram was perfect and I so was my implementation of it. I was beginning to think I had lost it entirely... phew

So here are the specs:

A]

I changed my philosophy from "the more the better" to more "ergonomic" design. So I sacrificed options I didn't use to simplify access to the options that mattered, that is distinct options rather than a whole spectrum of them. So I kept two single coil modes and a humbucker mode and their respective out-of-phase setups and that's it.

B]

I breathed new life into my guitar by making an OVERBRIGHT knob, that is a knob that passively boosts the top end of the signal (yes I said passive boost). I always found my guitar kinda weak. The overbright knob is a tone pot wired in series with the volume, allowing me to favor the treble frequencies when I want to, unlike the regular parallel tone that cuts them. So here's how you make one:

This is how I represent a pot:

left-----------wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww---------right

middle______________________^

Intercept the hot lead between the volume and the output jack. Solder the hot coming from the volume to the middle tab. Connect a cap (I used 0.56 microF I think and a 47 picoF together) across the left and right tabs. Finally connect the left tab to the output jack (hot).

This setup allows you to select between leaving the signal unaltered or filtering out some bass. Funnily, I can describe the result more like a boost in treble and volume rather than a cut of the bass register. Even better so

So if you have a guitar that can't cut through, try this before investing into new pickups.The overbright control can work independently from a regular tone knob (I have both). If you are more experienced with techie stuff than me, you can probably select better cap values. I used whatever I could find ripping apart old circuit boards...

- RG -

To be able to play what you hear, you gotta train your ear to identify intervals and scales and chords and tones... Poking around blindly until you find the right note is very frustrating. That's what I'll help you fix here.

Unlike learning your fretboard so that you KNOW where you are (see my other blog: http://www.guitar.com/kimonf/blog/tutorial_learn_your_fretboard_finding_the_notes ), learning to HEAR the fretboard is not something you can accomplish in an hour or two.

But you don't have to pull it on your own. There is a nice little free application designed to help you train yourself to identify note intervals and scales and chords.

http://www.solfege.org

It looks simple but it packs a very complete selection of exercises such as:

Identifying every interval in ascending, descending and harmonic modes, scales, chords, identify tones and hone your intonation hearing. I for one intend to practice with it a lot! You can also practice singing all of the above.

When you have a little time or are tired of working, launch it and hone your ear. There are even visualizations, including a fretboard, so you can relate the intervals directly to the guitar. It won't happen overnight, but if you keep at it you'll eventually get better. Promise!

Be well!

- RG -

There are tons of online resources and tools to help you find and form chords. But what if you can't have access to them all the time? This is a practical guide aimed at the beginner who wants to be able to play chords when only their name is given or to name chords when the shape is given. What I won't discuss is theory subjects like how to put different chords together to form tunes. I leave that to the experts.

The guide is divided in 4 parts.

In part 1 we'll go through the major scale, which is the standard by which all chords are named and we'll learn the different shapes of a major chord.

In part 2 we'll introduce some more simple 3-note chords that are easily related to the major chord.

In part 3 we'll introduce 4-note chords like the popular "7th" chord and its derivatives.

In part 4 I'll show you the 9th and 11th chords, the "added note" chords and discuss some aspects of chord nomenclature.

At the end there's a printable quick-reference sum-up.

Disclaimer:

THAT'S QUITE A BOATLOAD OF CHORDS THERE AND SOME ARE QUITE TRICKY TO FINGER SO DON'T EXPECT TO BE ABLE TO PLAY THEM ALL TOO SOON!

PART 1

If you don't know where all the notes on the fretboard are, now is a good time to learn them. Follow the link to a previous entry of my blog:

http://www.guitar.com/kimonf/blog/tutorial_learn_your_fretboard_finding_the_notes

But for the sake of completeness, here is a chart of the notes in standard tuning:

Note how the pattern repeats itself after the 12th fret. The color code only helps the eye distinguish the octaves.

The reference point for describing any scale or chord is the major scale. So before we can move on, we must get to know it:

The intervals between notes are w-w-h-w-w-w-h which I like to show like this:

1 _ 2 _ 3 4 _ 5 _ 6 _ 7 1

"w" means whole tone which is equal to a distance of 2 frets

"h" means half tone (semitone) and is equal to a distance of 1 fret

The notes in the major scale are numbered in order like shown, with "1" being the root (the note that gives its name to the scale/chord) .

Two more symbols you must get familiar with are the "accidentals": The "flat" or "b" which indicates you must lower the note one semitone (move it one fret lower) and "sharp" or "#" which means you must raise the note one semitone (move the note one fret up). These symbols are used to describe the notes that fall between the numbered notes of the scale as well as the notes that have no name (like the note between G and A in the notes chart above).

If you chart out the major scale on a fretboard it looks like this:

The pattern repeats itself in both directions. The scale pattern is independent from the actual fret-numbers and can be moved around to fit any root note.

This is the chart that will help us conquer the world of chords :) so be sure to print a copy (along with the Notes Chart if you want) and keep it handy for reference.

Our first chord will be the major chord.

A major chord only uses the 1 , 3 and 5 from the major scale. ANY combination of 1,3,5 is a valid major chord. Take advantage of the simplicity of the chord and see how many 3-note (1,3,5) chord shapes you can play, using the scale chart.

For the sake of clarity at this early stage, here is a version of the chart where I have kept only the 1s, 3s and 5s. Below the chart I have marked "boxes" whose patterns form some of the simplest major chords in the first three frets. I've added the actual chords in TAB format. You might already be familiar with them.

Please do try to see the similarity of the shapes between the TAB and the respective chart boxes.

By moving these patterns up and down the fretboard you can achieve major chords for all notes. Bold marks the root.

Here is an example.

Say you want to form a major G chord. First you locate a "G" on your fretboard (using the Notes Chart if necessary). This will give you the realtive position of the chord pattern on the fretboard. The "G" is now your "1" aka root. Now you have to look in the scale chart for possible 1,3,5 shapes that include your root. It's simpler than it sounds.

Try it on your own and compare notes with the following results. These are all the "boxed" major G chords you can form:

Again, the fret numbers are determined by the necessity of the root ("1") to be a "G".

Play around with the major chords and come back in a couple of days for the next part.

PART 2

Hopefully you are starting to get the hang of the major chords and the charts by now.

In this part I'll introduce you to some more 3-note chords. Bring your Major Scale Chart (the simplified version for the major chord will do for now too) for reference and remember what I said about "b" and "#".

Here it goes:

With the major chord as the standard:

-a minor chord occurs when you lower the 3 half a tone, thus being 1,b3,5

-a suspended chord is formed by replacing the 3 with either 2 (sus2) or 4 (sus or sus4).

-an augmented chord is formed by raising the 5 half a tone, thus making 1,3,#5

-a diminished chord is formed by lowering the 5 half a tone, thus making 1,3,b5

The examples in A show you how that works. Apply the rules to the other major shapes by yourself, using the Scale Chart to help you.

NOTE: Don't freak out if a chord is named both minor and diminished... Minor affects the "3", diminished affects the "5". Refer to part 4.

With the new chord types you learned in this part you have enough material to work on for quite some time, applying the rules to all boxes and you can even write many simple but decent enough tunes with these chords...

PART 3

If you are still clumsy with the chords discussed above, don't rush yet into this part, as it only gets more complex.

A very popular chord in blues and rock (and elsewhere of course) is the 7th. It consists of 1,3,5,b7 (that's right, b7. You do remember what "b" means, right?).

Charted it looks like this:

Evidently adding a note to the pattern makes the chart more complex. Again I've marked the boxes and an example chord that fits each, except this time I didn't tab out the example chords. I trust that by now you are familiar enough with the Scale Chart to be able to use it on your own to form chords.

All you have to do is find groups of 1,3,5,b7 that you can fret together.

NOTE: As you can see, there are usually more than two notes on each string whithin the same box. Which allows you to finger the same chord in more than one ways, thus changing how it sounds. Try that out. Here are two B7 for example:

2--2

0--5

2--2

1--5

2--2

x--x

Below the chart I added some related chords:

-a major 7th (major refers to th 7) is formed by raising the b one semitone, thus making 1,3,5,7

-a diminished 7th is formed by lowering both the 5 and b7 by a semiton, making 1,3,b5,bb7 or simply 1,3,b5,6

-a half diminished 7th (aka "minor 7th - flat fifth") happens by lowering only the 5 one semitone to make 1,3,b5,b7

Practice the different shapes of 7ths you can form as they are quite common. That's doesn't mean you should ignore the others.

PART 4

9th Chord : 1,3,5,b7,9 or 1,2,3,5,b7

maj9 : b7->7 ==> 1,2,3,5,7

dim9 : 9->b9 ==> 1,2,3,5,b7,b9

11th : 1,3,5,b7,9,11 or 1,2,3,4,5,b7

The 9th chord adds one more note to the chord making them 5 notes. I didn't chart it out because the chart becomes too crowded to be any better than the full Scale Chart. The necessity to have all 5 notes restricts the available possibilities of alternative fingerings for most boxes.

The 11th chords adds yet one more note. With 6 notes that need to co-exist the fingering options are narrowed down to just 4 shapes that I can reach

More popular than the 9th and 11th chords are the "added note" chords. Their construction is straight forward. You take the major scale and add whatever note is requested by the name.

Two types of chords stand out in this category:

the add4 or simply (4) and the add9 or (9) which are 1,3,4,5 and 1,2,3,5 respectively. Also the 6th chord (simply X6 where X is the name of the root), which is 1,3,5,6

Basically these two offer some sound qualities from the awkward 9th and 11th chords while remaining easy to fret. Cadd9 is a very popular chord.

Nomenclature

Chords can have more than one descriptive modules chained in their name. For instance, all the chords I mentioned where based on the major triad chord. There are however minor equivalents of them. So here is roughly how it goes:

-A chord with no definitions is a major chord.

-"minor" or simply "m" affects the 3 and lowers it to b3.

-"sus" affects the 3 too and can't co-exist with "minor".

-"aug" affects only the 5 and is compatible with other modifiers (except "dim" and "dim7").

-"7" adds a note and is compatible to all above (unecessary for 9th and 11th chords) .

-"M7" or "maj7" affects only the 7 and is compatible with other modifiers (except "dim7")

-9 and 11 add notes each and are compatible with modifiers for 3,5 and 7

-"add" or "(...)" adds a note and is compatible with other modifiers and with itself.

- "X/Y" where "X" is any chord and "Y" is a note or chord means "X chord with a Y in the bass". "Y" can be part of the chord (but not the root) or not.

BACKWARDS OPERATION:

When you start writing songs and experiment with chord fingerings, you will find yourself in the position of needing to know what a certain chord fingering you like might be named. In that case, you take the full Scale Chart and try to fit the chord shape over it by using every fretted note as a possible "root" on the Chart (of course if you suspect what the root is the process will be quicker). The winner is whichever root note suggestss the less complex naming for the chord and has the less notes implied by the name "missing" (like an 11th chord is not really an 11th if say... the 5 and 9 are missing from what you play).

There.

Hopefully this enough info to get you going with your own creations as well as reading and playing chord-sheets without going looking for chord charts all the time.

Enjoy!

- RG -

With THREE hands-on videos (approx 20mins total) and pictures :D What more can you possibly ask for?

I'll cover the process of restringing in the first video and the process of setting up the balance after a tuning change or string gauge change as well as a few points on setting the intonation in the second vid. The third vid raises a point to blocking the bridge. So help yourselves!

You can hunt for additional videos on youtube. There are many out there, presenting different approaches. I just couldn't include all ideas in my vids because I'd need to make a couple more videos (maybe if I spoke faster I could include more...). So look around and combine the ideas that work best for you.

The basics

When you tighten strings you increase their pull on the bridge. Fixed bridges counter that tension by being solidly fixed on the wooden body. Tremolo systems, and especially the floating type (like Floyds), counter the tension with a set of springs mounted in a cavity at the back of the guitar.

So the Floyd bridge is basically hanging mid-air, stabilized by the pull of the strings on one side and of the springs on the other. The bridge's "zero point", the stability point, is where the tension of the springs is equal to that of the strings. Tuning up the strings increases their tension, as does sretching the springs.

Because of that fine and fragile balance between springs and strings, tuning such a guitar can be a very long and frustrating process. I've been there and now I'm gonna give you a few practical tips I learned along the way.

Tips on restringing

1) Don't remove all strings at the same time, if there is no pressing reason to do so (like taking off the pickguard, washing the fretboard, removing the bridge etc).

Remove one string at a time, put the new one and tune it up. You'll notice the bridge will tilt back when you remove the old string and all the other strings will go sharp and out of tune. That's ok. When you put the new one and tune it to the same pitch as the old one, the balance will be restored.

2) Keep the same gauge of strings, unless you really want to change gauge. Don't change gaugeall the time, just because you didn't care or didn't remember what gauge to use.

Strings of different gauge, produce different tension at the same pitch. Inevitably this will affect the fragile balance of the bridge. Tuning, intonation and zero point will all need to be readjusted. That's not something you want to do all the time. Trust me, it's a long boring process.

3) If you do remove all strings at once, there is a way of speeding up the tuning process when you put them back on.
With the new strings all in place, grab the arm/bar or whatever you want to call it and push it down until the bridge reaches an approximately horizontal position (the "zero point" position) and while keeping it there tune the strings up to pitch (your hand won't be steady so don't worry about perfection). This way you bypass the biggest part of the long process of consecutive tunings needed until the bridge reaches it's balance point. Release the bar and keep tuning the strings until balance is restored. It may take a few minutes, but it would have taken half an hour if you did it without the shortcut.

**) BLOCK THE BRIDGE:

Find a tool like a wrench, spoon or whatever you can get, that you can insert under the tail on the whammy and prevent it from sinking into the body when you loosen strings. The brisge must be blocked as close to its playing position as possible, otherwise it's pointless. In the following pic (taken from a re-wiring job, so don't freak out at the looks of it) I have used a wrench to block the bridge:

Blocking the bridge is very useful. It keeps it in place while you replace or loosen strings. This way, when you tune the string again, the bridge will be immediately balanced.

Setting the "zero point" position

The zero or balance point of the bridge must be identical to what is refered to as the horizontal or parallel position. With most floyd-type bridges this means literally that the bridge base plate must be parallel to the surface of the body. However, Ibanez Edge tremolos have a wedge profile design. Setting an Edge's top surface parallel with the body surface is very wrong, because that means the bridge is actually in a very pulled-back position. To determine the horizontal position of an Edge, locate the rectangle patch on the side of the bridge. Use the rectangle as your reference point and set it parallel to the the guitar top.

Setting the zero point position of a bridge is necessary after changing tuning or string gauge.

Tune the guitar well. Notice which way the bridge tilts. If it tilts forward, the strings are stronger than the springs. Tighten the screws (both the same amount) on the spring claw until the bridge has moved about halfway back towards horizontal position. The strings will have gone sharp. Loosen them back to pitch. Tune them well again. The bridge will have moved further back towards horizontality. Repeat as necessary. The closer to horizontal position you get, the smaller the adjustments you need to. If your bridge tilts backwards, then follow the same process but loosen the screws on the spring claw instead of tightening them and tinghten the strings instead of loosening them.

(see pics below)

This is a good place with loads of tips
on setup and maintense of floating bridges. It's focused on Ibanez models but physics are physics and know no brandnames.

http://www.ibanez-rules.com

Scroll down below the pics for more tips from readers of this blog.

This is how an Edge looks like well-balanced and unbalanced:

Parallel position:

Too loose (tilting forward):

And too tight (tilting backwards):

Notice how in this last one, the top surface of the trem base plate is parallel to the body. This is the proper position for Floyds and most copies, but it is a wrong position for an Edge.

These are the screws in the back of the guitar, that determine how tight your springs are:

Additional tips from readers

Comment by Tybalt On — 04-25-2007 05:40:36 EDT

========================================================

Hope this helped!

- RG -

 ----------------------------------------------------------------

 REPLIES TO:

@Chris, you didn't leave any way for me to contact you so I'm posting here and hope you see it. (the comments section appears broken to me and I can't post in it).

You will find some measurements for proper bridge height and truss rod action here: http://www.guitar.com/kimonf/blog/tutorial_guitar_maintenance_manual_light_edition It's for Ibanez guitars but any guitar with the same scale length (25.5") shouldn't differ much. Use these measurements to see if it is the truss rod or the bridge that needs to be adjusted.

(Yeah, okay... So I love cats. So what?)

Family shot of my axes:

Ibanez SR305dX, Ibanez RG270DX (not stock), Washburn DC46, Ibanez AEL20

The RG:

I don't have digital pics of what it started out looking like. This pic is the oldest, already heavily modded :

^Here I have modded the electronics, but the bridge is still the stock P.O.S.

^Bragging its new Edge bridge

^While I was rewinding the middle pickup.

^ SUMMARY: DiMarzio Multibucker pickups (discontinued), Ibanez Powersound single coil pickup (rewound), cavities re-routed, all new controls with an extra 5-way and extra pot added and an insane wiring scheme, Ibanez Lo-Pro Edge whammy in place of the stock el-crapo floyd-copy.

I love gutting this axe:

The acoustics

^Both stock.

The bass

^Stock

THE TEMPLE OF THE KING - Rainbow

In my search for a simple tune that would help improve my (and hopefully your too) sliding along the neck, the solo from temple of the king winked at me :P . It is the perfect candidate - few notes, big spaces: the key for a successful first tune to play with a slide.

If you have no clue about how to play slide, consult my introductory article and video:

http://www.guitar.com/kimonf/blog/tutorial_slide_guitar

So here's the tab for this entry's tune :

Be warned. In the tab I have only noted the original recording's approximate techniques. I leave figuring out how to get from one note to the next to you. Use your ear to see what adds to and what takes away from the melody. If you have read my introductory article, you should be able to noodle around til you get it.

And here comes the video. The only reason I made it (and showed off my own incompetence) is that not all of you may have the original record to listen to.

Enjoy!

- RG -

"Ah! THAT's where I stashed them!" was my reaction when I found the guitar maintenance leaflets that were freely included in the boxes when I bought my 2 ibanez guitars, which I had lost, again, while trying to put them somewhere easily accessible. The concepts described in these manuals for these guitars can be usually applied to other guitars as well. Even if optimum measurements may vary slightly, I think these documents are a good source for getting started.

I met many ibanez owners who didn't get those manuals with their guitars so, if nothing else, this blog entry is for them.

This is a link to the actual document central of Ibanez

http://www.ibanez.com/support/

where you can find the most up-to-date versions of the documents. It is worth taking a look at those, because they do have some very informative schematics.

If you want a closer hands-on look into floating-type bridge setup and restringing, you can view my tutorial here: http://www.guitar.com/kimonf/blog/howto_restring_and_set_up_a_floyd

All manuals are copyrighted to Ibanez, but I don't see any stated prohibition to reproduce these manuals (they are free after all and I don't intend to take any credit for them) so I'm gonna shoot some screenshots and host them elsewhere, just so that I have something more to show in this page. I don't think Ibanez will take down the support pages from their site and I don't see why they would change the url either so my copying the stuff here is just for "decoration" of this blog page with some of the most common issues.

These are selections taken all from the manuals and they cover the most needed topics of guitar life.

Enjoy!

- RG -

I had been thinking a long time about doing this and eventually I did. As you can see in thepic, myRG is rigged with 3 pots and 2 5-way switches.Two of the pots hide push-pull switches. Also one of the 5-way switches is a 4-pole monster, the other is regular.

As you can also see, the pickups look odd. The middle pickup is a normal single coil, the stock one actually, which I have rewound to lesser power. The neck and bridge pickups are each two pickups in one. Each of the humbucker-looking pickups contains a DiMarzio Fast Track 1 and a DiMarzio Chopper, both of which are single coil-sized humbuckers. So you can say my guitar has 5 pickups on it, instead of 3.

With the help of the switches there, I regulate which pickups are active, since there are so many of them: There is a regular 5-way selector, there is the big 4-pole 5-way that tweaks the neck and bridge operation modes, one push-pull  activates both the neck and bridge together when either of them is already active and the other push-pull reverses the phase of the middle pickup.

The current configuration of the neck and bridge pickups is: Humbucker, Fast Track 1, Chopper, single coil mode with reversed phase at the bridge and humbucker mode with reversed pahse at the bridge.

Each switch is independent so if you work it out, there are many combinations in there. To be honest, not all of them sound good. Most of the time they don't even sound distinct enoughfrom one another. So why do I keep them? Two reasons: 1)It's mechanical, not midi, which means some combinations occur whether I want the or not. 2) What sounds lousy in certain settings can sound interesting under different settings, so I like to keep options.

The samples you're about to hear, are a few selected combinations from all across the range of options. The idea is to show you the type of sounds I can get, not every variation of every type of sound.

All samples were taken with the same amp settings and guitar volume and tone settings.I didn't spend time tweaking a nice sound out of the amp. Maybe  I should have.

SAMPLE 1:

In order of appearacne:

bridge humbucker,

bridge Chopper,

bridge Fast Track 1,

middle pickup,

neck Fast Track 1,

neck Chopper,

neck humbucker.

http://soundclick.com/share?songid=6890656

I rarely use the Choppers because they sound quite like the humbuckers, but they have more definition which shows in distorted situations

SAMPLE 2:

NOTE: In all of the following clips, the bridge pickup has its phase reversed.

In order of appearance: 

bridge humbucker - middle pickup

bridge humbucker - middle pickup - neck humbucker

bridge humbucker - neck humbucker (sounds like a fixed wah)

bridge Chopper - neck Fast Track 1

bridge Chopper - middle pickup - neck Fast Track 1

middle pickup (for reference)

http://soundclick.com/share?songid=6890668

The two modes utilizing all 3 pickup, offer a good clean bright sound that I often prefer to any of the sounds I get from any "normal" pickup mode.

- RG -

DISCLAIMER: I will not be held responsible if you damage your guitar, its current or future parts or yourself in any way. By reading further and applying the ideas presented, you agree that you do so at your own risk. Solder paste is toxic and the soldering iron tip is very hot and can melt and burn stuff that comes in contact with it. If you are in doubt of your abilities, have a guitar tech do the mod for you.

The stuff that follows applies to passive pickups. Active pickups follow the same rules but the implementation is more complex. I’ve never seen an active setup up close and I won’t presume to know anything about them.

The first sections are dedicated to understanding the basics. Once you are confident about them, the next sections will elaborate into humbucker modes and additional controls. You can find several schematics for common setups on the websites of guitar and pickup manufacturers, but I always get asked about stuff, so I’m trying my best here to teach you how to figure it out on your own. Not that I don’t like to help but teaching you how to solve a problem is better than to solve it for you, don’t you agree?

Contents:

• Electricity, wires, connections
• What is a pickup (construction, connection)
• Integration into a circuit (switch, volume, tone)
• The bigger picture
• Coil splitting
• Volume and tone controls

Electricity, wires, connections

Bringing this up so early in the article is premature but anywhere else it disrupts the flow. This is a very important section to understand. It is the key to understanding why things that look different are in fact the same.

• Electricity only flows in complete continuous circuits. By this I mean that you have to be able to track a continuous path through wires and switches and pickups from the output jack and back to the output jack. More commonly though, if you connect a global volume control correctly, that control will serve as your start and end. Switches are a point where you selectively break the continuity of one circuit and establish continuity for an alternative one. When designing a circuit you must always think of the entire active paths for all the combinations of switch positions and make sure for every path that everything you want active is on the path and that nothing that you don’t want active is on that path.
• Theoretically, every spot along the active electrical path is electrically identical until a “device” is found. In a guitar with passive circuitry, the only “devices” you are likely to find is the pickup (well actually it is the power source, but that complicates things), the tone control and the volume control. The switch is NOT a device because it has theoretically no resistance/impendance and neither do the wires that connect the “devices”. Every point along the path between two devices is identical to every other point on the same path. Dead-end branches of a circuit are not to be ignored. Any branch of the active circuit is also active.

Putting this graphically is a little challenging for me but I’ll try. Here is a rudimental schematic of two pickups, a 3-way switch, a volume control and an output jack. Red and green are the wires. Blue are the movable parts of the circuit. In the first schematic, only one pickup is active, in the second one both pickups are active. 3 portions of the path can be seen and all the points on each portion are identical with all the other points of the same portion. The purple highlight is the ground portion (all points along the purple are considered ground, yes even the dead-end branch leading to the inactive pickup), orange is the final hot portion and yellow is the hot portion between the pickups and volume. Notice that points on both sides of the switch are identical, unless the switch interrupts that branch. This means that points A, B, C, D, E and F are identical. If you branched a tone control at any of these points it would act exactly the same, for THAT position of the 3-way switch ONLY. Changing the switch position may cut off some of these points.

pic 0.1

A consequence of this is that all the ways to electrically connect three points shown below are identical:

pic 0.2

What is a pickup?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick_up_(music_technology)

It is the device that turns mechanical energy into electrical energy, in other words it converts the motion of the strings into an electrical signal that amplifiers and effects can work with. This would be a good time to look up electromagnetism in your highschool physics books. You’re looking for induction, that is the ability of a changing magnetic field to generate electric current. The opposite phenomenon to the one used in pickups is the electromagnet, where electricity is used to generate a magnetic field. While you’re looking this up, also look up electricity (helps with understanding circuits) and waves (helps understand phase, hum cancellation etc).

Construction

A pickup consists of two major elements: the coil (wire wound around a plastic bobbin) and the magnet. The magnet creates a steady magnetic field and the coil picks up the changes in this field caused by the motion of the strings. Sort of like setting up a bait and a trap and waiting for the mouse to show up.

3 properties affect how you connect a pickup:

1. Magnet polarity (north/south). On a guitar with multiple pickups, the magnetic fields should all be facing in the same direction. This is something you probably never have to worry about, unless you actually make pickups yourself.
2. Coil polarity (+/-). Clockwise and counterclockwise wound coils produce opposite currents. Pairing two coils with opposing polarities is commonly used to cancel out the 50-60Hz hum of the electrical powerlines and it is called a humbucker. The reason the signal is not entirely cancelled is because the coils are offset, producing lightly different signals except for the ambient 50Hz noise which will be close to identical for the two coils.
3. Coil phase. Each coil has two wires coming out. Which you use as hot and which you use as cold greatly affects the sound produced when the pickup is blended with other pickups. Opposite phases cancel out frequencies and it can create interesting twangy sounds for blues, funk or indie or it can sound hideously thin and weak. The same concept can be applied to humbuckers too.
4. Some pickups are not symmetrical. On most guitars you can’t choose how to orient a single coil pickup because their casing (the pickups’) is not symmetrical and neither is the guitar cavity that houses them. But humbuckers are symmetrical in shape and you can install them with either coil facing the bridge. With some humbuckers this will affect the sound but there’s often no right or wrong, only what your ears like most.

Connection

pic 1

First of all let me say that the (+) and (-) have no electrical meaning in this pic because we’re talking about alternate current. They are just there to identify sides.

A pickup in its basic form is a single coil. For it to work, the two ends of the coil must form a circuit. For this, one side is connected to ground and the other is the active portion of the signal sent to the amplifier. If either side is disconnected, the pickup is inactive. Commonly the ground side is permanently connected and by connecting/disconnected the other (the hot) side we can turn the pickup on/off. A humbucker follows the same principle, one side is grounded, the other side is hot. In its basic form a humbucker is connected to the rest of the circuit exactly as if it were a single coil. Notice in the pic that a humbucker has two coils daisy-chained together. This is known as the “in series” mode. There are other ways to use a humbucker, which we’ll explore later.

CAUTION: Different brands use different color codes for the wires coming out of their pickups. Consult the manufacturer for their color code before starting a swap of pickups.

CAUTION: Always make an accurate and detailed chart of the current wiring of your guitar (all connections and wire colors and origin and anything additional that will help you tell one wire from the other). That way you have something to go back to if you mess up.

CONVENTION: In this article I use red for hot, green for ground. Later in the article if things get complex and I need more colors for clarity, I’ll use red (hot) with black (ground) for one coil and blue (hot) and green (ground) for the other coil of a humbucker.

Integration into a guitar circuit

There’s more to a guitar’s electronics than a pickup and an output jack (well, there are exceptions). Typically there is a selector switch, one or more volume controls, one or more tone controls and in some cases other controls as well.

There are serial controls and parallel controls in a circuit. You can combine such in various ways but typically the pickups, main switch, volume controls and output jack are serially connected. Tone controls and coil-split switches are parallel to elements of the main circuit.

Switch

The switch is your means to quickly turn pickups on and off. At the same time, in a typical setup, the switch is also your blend point; the point where individual signals from the pickups are blended. This is important in deciding where to put certain controls. Pickup-specific controls (pickup volume, pickup tone and others) must go before the switch (it makes sense, right? Put the pickup-specific controls before the signals are blended together into one signal). Global controls (global volume, global tone…) must come after the switch (makes sense too, huh?). Except for the pickups and output jack, everything else in the schematic below is optional, at the cost of the respective functionalities.

pic 2

There are various types of switches used for various things in a guitar. The two most common switches are the 3-way (for two pickups) and the 5-way blender for 3 pickups. It is called blender because in positions 2 and 4 it automatically blends the signal from 1 and 3 or 3 and 5 respectively. The 3-way has one blend position, the middle one.

  pic 3

Volume

Without going into much detail, the volume control is a split of paths for the signal. One path remains hot, the other path is a shortcut to the ground. The two paths are separated by a variable resistor. In the pic, signal input is the rightmost connection to the control. Hot output is the middle connection and the alternative ground output is the leftmost connection. By adjusting the volume control, you balance how much of your electrical signal goes to each output. The more that goes to ground the less volume you have. The back of a volume pot is often used as the gathering point for all ground connections. You can find more details on the volume control at the bottom of the page.

pic 4

Tone

The tone control works in a similar way. It offers an alternative path to the signal and that path leads to the ground too. The difference from the volume is that the path is gated by a capacitor. The type and value of the capacitor affect which frequencies are allowed through (a high-pass filter). High capacitor values allow a wider range of treble to pass through. But since the path leads to the ground, the frequencies allowed through the capacitor are effectively removed from your signal (hence you lose treble when you roll down the tone). By controlling the resistance of this path, you determine how much signal is lost this way. The tone control is a parallel element to the circuit. You can find more details on the tone control at the bottom of the page.

  pic 5

The bigger picture

Ok now you’ve seen, how each individual control comes into the game. Even though you should be able to roll on your own now, chances are you are still confused. So let’s put together a model circuit, piece by piece. I’m intentionally copy-pasting elements and sub-sections of the schematics to show you that it is all modular. You don’t need a complete exact schematic of the wiring you want to implement because often you can’t find the exact match. But if you can identify the modules in the circuit, you can find and take elements from other schematics to make your own setup work.

• First, let’s add the volume and tone. It is more convenient to connect everything on the volume control than directly to the output jack. The back of the volume control is the gathering point for all ground connections.

  pic 6

• That’s not very interesting, although it was popular in the ‘80s. We need at least one more pickup to make it electrically interesting and we have to decide if we want global or local controls. I say we let them be global. So let’s add a second single coil and a humbucker to spice things up. For the tone and volume to be global, the switch will come before them.

  pic 7

Notice nothing changes for the volume and tone. Instead of being fed a signal from a single pickup, they are fed the blended signal from the switch but as far as they are concerned nothing has changed. Also notice that the 3 pickups are all connected in exactly the same way to the switch and volume control. There is still something missing from pic 7: the splitting function for the humbucker, but I leave that for later (pic 10).

• Now let’s also make a schematic with pickup-specific controls. Let’s take 2 humbuckers and give each its own volume and tone (LP style).

  pic 8

Again nothing changes for the volume and tone, except now there’s a second pair of them. Each pair handles signal sent directly from one pickup. Basically it is pic 6 twice (if you can’t see that, you’re not ready to read further). The two copies of pic 6 have to share the same output jack so a 3-way switch takes up the job of blending the two signals just before the output.

• Now let’s make a mixed setup. 3 pickups, global volume, 2 tone controls for 2 out of the 3 pickups (can you say Strat?).

pic 9

Now compare this with pics 7 and 8. Something is off, right? The tone controls are feeding off of the switch. Indeed, the connection points of the pickups to the switch are the only accessible point of each pickup’s individual signal before the switch blends the signals. Since the tone controls are parallel controls, nothing changes as far as the switch and volume are concerned compared to pic 7.

There is an alternative, less economic way to achieve the same result:

  pic 9.1

If the explanation that follows confuses you, leave it for now. In electrical terms this is identical to pic 9. The tone controls come alive only when the switch turns on their connection to the hot point. To understand why these are identical refer to the section at the top of the article. In terms of human-centric concept however there is a difference. In this setup you could consider each tone control to be a global tone control that is however only active when the switch is in the respective position. Why global? Because if you track down the red wire (top left of the switch) which is the switch output for the tone controls, you’ll see it connects to the hot point after the pickup signals are blended. The truth is that the same is true for pic 9 too (being global controls), but the layout there is such that it is conveniently masked to look like the tone controls work on an individual pickup’s signal. In reality, all the points between the pickups and the volume control are electrically identical once they are activated by the switch.

Coil splitting

There is one more thing left to mention before we conclude the first round of sections in this tutorial. Like I said earlier in pic 7, something was missing. If you have guitars with humbuckers and single coils, this is something you have to be aware of. Splitting as it is achieved with a 5-way switch, is a little hard to grasp because it doesn’t use the output connection of the switch, but instead it joggles with the input connections, using the middle input as output.

Like I mentioned early up, humbuckers consist of two coils in order to cancel 50Hz hum. In a 3 pickup guitar with a single coil in the middle and one or two humbuckers, there are positions of the 5-way switch where you end up with 3 coils active (2 from the humbucker and 1 that is the middle pickup). 3 doesn’t cancel hum. To remedy this, you turn off one of the coils of the humbucker, the coil that has the same polarity with the middle pickup. This way you then have only two coils again and you are humbucking and happy.

To do this, you have to get in between the two coils and short one of them out. No, put that screwdriver down and slowly back away from the pickup! :P We’ll use the switch for this. Some humbuckers only offer two wires. You can’t split these humbuckers. Some others offer 3 wires (the two coils are connected together but the pickup gives you remote access to that connection). That will do fine. Most commonly they offer 4 wires, which means the coils are not connected at all, giving you full control (see humbucker modes later in the tutorial). To short one of the coils out, you connect the middle point between the coils to either the ground or the hot. Which you choose, determines which coil stays active and whether you stay humbucking in positions 2 and 4 of the switch or not. Using a hot connection to split a humbucker is dangerous in the sense that if you don’t do it exactly like I’ll show you, you are almost guaranteed to bypass the switch and have a pickup being active when you don’t want it to.

Instead of revising pic 7, I’ll use a guitar with 2 humbuckers and a single coil. You can make the extension as necessary to fit pic 7. Think modularity. If you can’t figure this out after everything I’ve said so far, you either rushed down here and need to go back up and read carefully or this tutorial has failed and you can stop reading it.

  pic 10

What is important to understand here is that the split wire sitting on input 1 is activated only in position 2 when the output wire from input 3 is also activated, and the split wire sitting on input 5 is only active when the switch is at position 4 for the same reason. The top example is with 3-conductor humbuckers, the bottom one shows 4-conductor humbuckers. Independently of this, the top example feeds a ground connection to the split connection, shutting down the bottom coils that now have ground on both ends at switch positions 2 and 4. The bottom example feeds a hot source to the splitters, shutting down the top coils that now have hot on both their sides at switch positions 2 and 4.

Think of it as a cascading fountain. You supply water to the top one and it flows from the top basin and fills the lower one. If you supply the water directly to the lower one, the top one will empty but the lower one will stay full.

Volume and Tone Controls

This is not really necessary for you to make mods. As long as you connect the two types of controls in ways equivalent to the ones shown in the pictures of the article above you should be fine. If you do want to understand them better though, read on.

In picture 0.1 while referring to active paths in relevance to the switch, I drew the volume control’s internals. Then later I mentioned it offers an alternative path to the signal, but i didn’t go into more detail. In similar fashion to pic 0.1 now I will display the active paths in relevance to the volume and tone controls. Yellow highlights the active path.

pic 11

When you roll back the volume, you bring the hot output (red arrow) closer to the ground point (green wire), thus allowing more signal to take the green path instead of the red one. However only the red path is used by FX and amplifiers.

Rolling back the tone reduces the resistance of that path allowing more signal to pass through and specifically more treble.

You may now proceed to Part II: Advanced Guitar Wiring.

If you haven’t read Part I: The Basics , now would be the time to.

Same disclaimer, warnings and convention apply as in Part I.

I may create some complete setup examples where I deem necessary, but I can’t possibly cover all the combinations. So I will be explaining things in minimal setups or subsections of schematics. Again, think modularity. The fact that I don’t draw other elements of a wiring setup is because they are irrelevant.

Contents:

• Additional switches
• Humbucker modes
• Serial/parallel mod
• Serial/single mod.
• Phase switch
• Blow switch
• Killswitch
• Override swich
• Position reallocation
  
• My personal favourite humbucker mode mod

Additional switches

In order to mod a guitar’s wiring to get it to do more tricks, you will usually need some extra switches. The most common switch for mods is the double-pole double-throw (DPDT) on-on switch. It’s a switch with two pairs of inputs and an output for each pair. It has only two positions, meaning that either input A or input B will have to be active but they can’t both be active a the same time. This switch is commonly used because it can be integrated in push/pull pot(entiometer)s used for volume or tone, which allows you to add a switch without drilling a new hole for it. I will be using it for nearly all of the mods discussed here.

Humbucker modes

A 4-conductor humbucker (that means it has 4 wires coming out of it, plus shield wire if any) is basically like two single coil pickups in one package. The ways you can connect the coils of a humbucker can be extended to connecting any two or more pickups, so this section comes first in this article. It is also a lot more common to want to mod a setup that has humbuckers than a setup with only single coils.

There are 6 ways to use a humbucker on its own:

pic 12

Depending on the humbucker, not all of these modes may sound usable. It goes without saying that the different modes must be achieved through a switch of some sort. Except for the 2 out of phase modes, all the others are common in humbucker mods with serial being the most common and factory setting, followed by one of the single coil modes.

The same modes can be applied to entire pickups. The normal setup with a 3-way or 5-way switch has the pickups working either alone or in parallel with one of the other pickups. Connecting two individual pickups serially is a bit cumbersome and gets in the way of normal pickup selection.

In Part I of the article, we saw what some major hot points are (switch connections, volume controls) and ground points (back of a volume pot almost always). When, in ANY way that you can come up with, the connection requirements of pic 12 are met, the pickup enters that mode. It would be useful to make an example or two. I will be using the 2 humbucker setup, as it is more common for people to want to modify that (only two pickups, only 3 switch positions). For space and clarity I’m leaving the tone controls out of the picture. Consult pic 8 if you don’t remember how to connect tone controls.

Notice that a mode switch will replace any coil splitting from the 5-way switch.

Serial - Parallel

I will add a serial/parallel mode switch to the volume pot of one of the 2 pickups. Same concept can be applied for the other pickup as well. A second dpdt switch will be necessary if you decide to do that.

pic 13a

I want you to focus on the blue and the black wires. The rest is exactly the same as pic 8. In position 1 of the switch, blue and black are connected to each other with the purple jumper connection. This is the serial connection. In position 2, the blue is connected to a hot point (the volume input) and the black to a ground (any will do).  That’s the parallel connection. Don’t let the presence of other stuff in the context confuse you. Track down the wires to the nearest hot or ground and match the setup to the modes in pic 12.

Here it is also for a single-single-humbucker setup, just to show you that nothing changes for the switch regardless of the context it is in. Same applies to the other mode mods that follow. Again, I omitted the tone control.

  pic 13b

Ok, maybe one thing changes, and it is important to mention it. Notice the orange wire? Can you see what it does? In parallel mode, the two coils become independent pickups. One of them is already connected to switch, but the other one isn’t. If you connect the second coil directly to hot on the volume control, it will always be on, never off. Unless you have thought about it and it’s what you want (having the bridge coil always on will give you some neck-bridge and neck-middle-bridge sounds), you will want to be able to control when the second coil in on. Most commonly you will want it to be on at the same time as the other coil. If you’re feeling crazy, you may want to tie that coil to one of the other pickups instead of it’s sibling coil.

Serial - Single coil

From parallel to single coil it is very simple. From position 2 of the dpdt switch in pic 13 remove either the “green” (to keep only coil B) or the “red” wire (to keep only coil A).  The two will sound different because the coils are offset. Try both and choose which you like most. I hope I don’t have to draw that for you but here goes anyway.

pic 14

Phase Switch

Connecting the coils of a humbucker in out of phase ways is not common. Instead I’ll show you how to reverse the phase of the entire pickup. The result of phase reversion is only apparent when the pickup is blended with a pickup whose phase has not been reversed, namely only in the middle position of the 3-way of the example.

pic 15

With this mod I introduce to you the very useful “X jumper” connection as I call it, because of its shape. It is the connection that reverses the roles of two wires. First of all notice that the humbucker is in serial mode always.  Splitting or setting it in parallel mode complicates the use of a phase switch because you then have more wires to deal with. Also notice I’ve detached BOTH the red and green wire of the humbucker from the volume. I need both of them to reverse the phase. If you look at pic 12, phase reversion occurs when you use the normal ground wire of a pickup as a hot wire and the normal hot wire as a ground wire. If coil-split wires are in use, they too must be reversed. Now lets look at the “X”. Follow the wires. In position 1 of the switch the red wire from the pickup crosses over the switch and lands on the hot input of the volume. Similarly the green wire crosses over and lands on the back of the volume (ground). In position 2 of the switch, the red wire lands on the ground at the back of the volume while the green wire lands on the hot input of the volume.

“Blow” switch

This switch will activate all your pickups at once, regardless of what position the 5-way is at. Obviously it is a mod that only makes sense if you have 3 pickups. If you have 2 you can have them all on as part of the normal pickup selection. Can you think of a way to turn all pickups on with a dpdt switch? Remember, the dpdt only has two interfaces and you have 3 pickups. So straightforward turning each  pickup on is out of the question. Bypass the 5-way? How in a switchable way? Too complex.

What if all the inputs of the 5-way received the same signal? What if we blended the signal of the 3 pickups before it even reached the switch? 3 inputs need 2 jumper connections so that they are all connected with one another. If they are all connected with one another they all receive the same signal, the blended signal of the 3 pickups. 2 switchable jumpers, 2 interfaces on the dpdt switch… Got the idea yet?

pic 16

In position 1 of the dpdt, nothing happens. In position 2 the middle and bridge pickups’ wires are joined. But the middle pickup wire crosses over to the other side of the switch too. There it is joined with the nick pickup’s wire. If A connects to B and A connects to C then B is also connected to C. So there, by pulling up the knob you blend the 3 pickups before the signal reaches the 5-way switch.

Notice that the blow switch is a parallel control. Which means the rest of the wirinig is identical to pic 8 in Part I of the article. I’ve added a coil split for the humbucker. It’s not necessary, I just wanted to remind you that there may be more elements in the circuit than the minimal that I’m using for my examples.

“Kill” Switch

That’s another mod that’s catching on. The kill switch is a very simple device. It is a button that when pressed it interrupts the circuit. Like the button that turns on the light in your fridge when you open the fridge door. On a guitar you’ll probably want that to be the final global control so that it kills the signal no matter what pickup configuration you’re using. So it will be the last thing before the output jack. It is serially connected on the hot wire.

pic 17

 Middle override switch

This concerns guitars with the H-S-H pickup configuration. The goal of this mod is to kick the single coil out of the way and make the guitar act like an H-H configuration. To achieve this we use a modified blow switch. Neck and bridge are solidly connected to the 5-way. A branch connects them to a DPDT as well. The middle pickup goes directly to the DPDT. Normally, the DPDT output sends the single coil signal back to the switch. When activated, the single coil is cut and the neck and bridge are channelled to the middle of the switch instead, in blow-fashion. This way you get neck in position 1, bridge in pos5 and neck-bridge in all the positions in between.

It is a cool mod for when you need simpler operation or for noisy environments where the single coil hums too much to be usable.

  pic 18

 Everything not shown in the scematic is to remain as is.

Position re-allocation for strats

Single coils hum. Strats typically have 3 of them but positions 2 and 4 of the 5-way are humcancelling thanks to using two pickups each, so many players  use them almost exclusivelly. Positions 2 and 4 however are hard to target on the fly. So if they are your main playing positions, this is a mod the will cost less than putting a set of silent pickups. It solves the accessibility issue of positions 2 and 4, not the hum issue itself.

  pic 19

The mod requires an extended 5-way switch. The idea is to rearrange the positions on the switch so to get the hum-cancelling ones to be in positions 1 and 5 which are easy to target. This will produce:

1 neck - middle

2 neck

3 middle

4 bridge

5 bridge- middle

Grand Mode-Switch

My favourite switch for humbucker mode switching is the 4-pole 5-way. It has 4 interfaces with 5 independent positions each. It is ideal for toying with the modes of your humbuckers. However, since it is a 5 way, it poses a problem. If you replace with it your regular 5-way, then you have to find a different way to blend the pickups. Otherwise you will have to cut a new slot for it. In that case, it’s best to use a guitar with a pickguard. If you regret cutting the slot, you can buy a new pickguard and it’s all good again.

In the past I used to show my own guitar’s crazy mod at this point. Instead I’ll show something a little simpler. Two humbuckers, one 4-pole 5-way, one 3-way (it will go in the spot of a tone control) and a push-pull volume. The tone spot will be replaced by the 3-way, so we’ll have no tone control (I rarely use it anyway). This version of my mod is meant so you can install it on many metal guitars without cutting new holes and stuff.

  pic 20

Panic yet? Don’t! Everything we have learned so far applies with no deviation. Don’t let the 5-way scare you. The philosophy is exactly the same as for the examples 13-16, but instead of working with 2 positions, we have 5 at our disposal. The phase switch also does not deviate from pic 15. The top pickup is connected to the 3 way and the mode switch as in all the previous examples. The bottom pickup combines the mode switch with a phase switch. The orange wires do exactly what they do in pic 13b, which is to ensure you have no renegade coils permanently switched on. The blue wires assist the orange ones in completing that task. Each orange wire goes exactly where the red wire of the other coil of the same pickup goes. Each blue wire goes exactly where the green wire of the other coil goes. This ensures that no matter which mode you are using, the phase and 3-way switches will react in a consistent way.

I urge you to try to figure out yourself what mode each position of the 5-way represents. Consider it a test to see if you understood everything I’ve tried to explain. Just track down the wires of each coil and see where they end up for different switch positions.

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don’t cheat

…

…

The switch treats the two humbuckers in exactly the same way, meaning they will be in the same mode always. You can set it up to engage a different mode for each pickup if you wish to. Just consult pic 12 for the necessary connections. Here, in position 1, the purple jumper wire connects the coils serially. Position 2 is the parallel mode. Position 3 is the grey coil alone and position 4 is the white coil alone. Position 5… is mute. No coil is active. Try to see if you can use position 5 to get the bridge humbucker to be serial and the neck one to be parallel, based on the knowledge you should have acquired by now.

There’s not much to say about the phase switch. For the same reason the orange wires need to be attached to the blend switch, the orange and blue wire must also be attached to the phase switch. You want to reverse the phase of whichever portion of the humbucker is active and this is the only way to do it.

Hopefully I've given you all the tools you need to solve wiring problems and design your own wiring mods. Now the best way for all of this to stay with you is... trial and error. Take a cheap guitar and start trying out stuff and see what the result of different mistakes is.