rick350v63 pup wiring

[tele0053]

I'm a veteran...well uhhh...maybe the more applicable term is victim of more than thirty years of, the dreaded fender/gibson guitar obsession/affliction/addiction, and I've relapsed and indulged myself in this.
Anyway, I recently bought a rick 350v63, (my first rick 6-string) the full size john lennon beatle guitar. A very cool guitar especially in front of the mirror.
Now remember I'm really a tele lead player, ala gattonish, buchanan, claptony, well you know what I mean. The rick believe it or not is a pretty good lead guitar, but it really shines in swampy rythmn, rick sorta stuff.
Here's my question, I heard from someone, somewhere that you can change, or take out a capacitor or something and it makes the front position, (which is total mud) come alive.
Does this modification sound familiar to anyone?
If so, please advise.

THANKS

[Don Miller]

I assume the guitar has toasters on it...the Ric higain pickups can get muddy real fast...even some of the older, pre-Scatterwound toasters are pretty hot and can get muddy...

..if the 350v63 is wired like my 370-12, the selection is bridge, middle and neck, and all three...John apparently disconnected the middle pickup on his guitar...and Roger McGuinn had 3 pickups on his because John had em...Roger apparently used the bridge pretty much exclusively...his Guitar had the unique "Byrds" wiring and the compressor and treble booster circuits too...

The Blender control...the 350v63 has a fifth knob, doesnt it? The blender will allow you to crank in some bridge pickup which cleans up the muddy bass

The is a mod to add a .0047 uF cap..in the bridge pickup
wiring...


The Rick registration site has some good technical stuff...and a great forum for all things Ric

http://personal.nbnet.nb.ca/mccorp/articles.html

[Teleologist]

If it's stock, the the schematic can be found at:

http://www.rickenbacker.com/us/19512.htm

The switching is bridge, all 3, neck+middle, as described in the previous post. There are a couple of different mods people do to these. The 5th knob is wired as a variable resistor in series with the neck/middle PUPs. It's audio taper and works backwards to put it in a more sensitive part of it's range(full CCW is full up).

If you just want to brighten up the neck/middle sound, you can add a .0047uF cap across the already-wired terminals of the 5th knob. This turns it into a bass-rolloff control for the neck/middle PUPs(turning it CW decreses the bass). This is a little more usefull than just wiring it in-series, but that's an option too. Values from .01 to .0022uF will give increasing amounts of rolloff. I've done this to my modern 360/12 and it can take the neck PUP into Strat-like territory.

Another option people do to these is wire the 3-way switch like a 2 PUP Ric, and rewire the 5th knob as a seperate volume control for the middle PUP, sometimes with a push/pull pot to turn it on & off(search TDP posts on Brent Mason wiring).

If you really want to get crazy, you can replace the 5th knob pot with a rotary switch - I've done this one my 360/6 with 5-wire minibuckers to add series/parallel/out of phase options. Not sure what you'd do with 3 SCs - just thought I toss that one out.

Many vintage Rics had a .0047uF cap in series with the bridge PUP, but many players removed these and Ric stopped doing it in the late 60s. Some Ric owners prefer to add it back. IMO this seems more common for guys who use AC30 type amps, less so for guys running Fenders.