5 Tone Barden Question

Referencing the 5-way using a "Superswitch" by Deaf Eddie in the resources
Does the green wire for neck pickup cover correspond with the plain wire on the Barden Tele neck? The enclosed diagram shows green and bare to ground.
Thanks, John

In the Five-Tone-Tele drawing posted here, the black lead from the neck pup is the coil's negative lead, and the green lead is the independent ground/shield for the metal cover.


I'm not familiar with the Barden pickup, but if the "plain wire" is the bare wire, that should be the independent ground/shield lead.

Correct me if i'm wrong ... although it can be done, Barden discourages tapping his pickups...

The Five Tone scheme doesn't use tapping. It's just two new connections - series and series/out of phase.

Coil-tapping refers to a secondary output connection, before the end of the full coil's wind, allowing you to bypass some of the coil's windings for a brighter tone. If your pickup doesn't have tapped leads built in from the manufacture, you can't wire a coil-tap...

And, I don't think ANY manufacture recommends that the end user attempts to add coil-taps to a pickup!

Consider yourself corrected...?

Thanks for the reply Eddie,
The colors I referred to were the Barden scheme. Black is Positive, Green and Bare are ground. I wired it up with black (barden +) to the yellow location (diagram Coil +) Green (Barden -) to Black location ( Diagram coil-) and bare to pot ground. I'm getting a severe "buzz" worse when I touch any component. I must be missing something in the Barden wiring. These are 4 wire plus a bare, but they link 2 wires and heat shrink them. They don't recommend the tap leads be disturbed.

I'm wondering if Barden's bare and green need to go to the same place since there's no cover on them, since it's almost a dead short type buzz, even though I'm getting some output with a tuning fork. I may try moving the bare to the switch and see what happens.

I'll try to give Barden a call tommorrow and post there input. Thanks, John

OK, that's the info we need. This is another example of SPLITTING the bare wire out from the colored lead that everybody sez is "ground" (technically, here it's not). We're caught by our own vocabulary shorthand...

The BARE wire is the ground/shield lead, it goes to ground on the back of volume pot with the other grounds.

The GREEN lead is NOT the "ground," as we normally regard it, here it's more properly termed the pickup's NEGATIVE lead. It's the one that should go to the 5-way to be switch for series and/or out of phase combos.

Split those two leads up, run the bare to there guitar's ground, run the green to the 5-way lug for the neck pup's negative lead, and see if that don't fix it.

FWIW: the two leads soldered together that you are advised not to disturb are indeed the leads we commonly call the series pair. Running a switch that shorts this junction to ground would coil-shunt the pickup, leaving just one coil active. That usually doesn't really do much with single-coil-sized pickups, other than reduce the output - no dramatic new tones. However, coils-parallel is a nice option on some of those pups...

Talked with Frank at Barden today. Bare wire is just an extra ground to the back of the pot. I pulled a DA when i wire to the new output jack. Phone rang just as I was soldering on the wires. It'll buzz with'em reversed.

BTW. Love this mod with the Barden's in my Haggard Tele !!
Thanks again, Eddie