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 -