2 pickup 1 volume no tone wiring

[SonicMustang]

I haven’t been able to find a diagram for 2 pickup, 1 volume no tone online. I usually use Seymour Duncan’s website.

I’m using a blade switch. Is it as simple as wiring a tele the normal way and just unsoldering everything that would connect to the tone pot?

 

[Steve Holt]

Yeah it's that simple.

Think about the most basic setup and then make it more complex. To me that would be a single pickup to the output jack, one wire to hot, the other wire to ground. Plug it in and it's at full volume full tone, everything straight to the amp.

Now let's add a volume. You'll have a pot with the hot wire of the pickup going to the first lug, the third lug grounded, usually by soldering that lug to the back of the pot and then grounding it, and the middle lug will be your output to the jack [EDIT I originally said switch by mistake]

Add a layer of complexity and add a switch and another pickup. Now rather than wiring the pickups directly to the volume pot, you wire them to the switch and connect the switch to the first lug of the volume pot.

Adding another layer of complexity would he adding a tone pot or two. Just skip that part!

 

[SonicMustang]

Yeah it's that simple.

Think about the most basic setup and then make it more complex. To me that would be a single pickup, one wire to hot, the other wire to ground. Plug it in and it's at full volume full tone, everything straight to the amp.

Now let's add a volume. You'll have a pot with the hot wire of the pickup going to the first lug, the third lug grounded, usually by soldering that lug to the back of the pot and then grounding it, and the middle lug will be your output to the switch.

Add a layer of complexity and add a switch and another pickup. Now rather than wiring the pickups directly to the volume pot, you wire them to the switch and connect the switch to the first lug of the volume pot.

Adding another layer of complexity would he adding a tone pot or two. Just skip that part!

This helped me understand wiring, ALOT more. I’ve been wiring pickups for 7-8 years now but always used a diagram and never really knew why I was going what I was doing…

so this will be a dumb question… does it matter which lug on a pot that you wire something to? Or are they all the same

 

[Steve Holt]

This helped me understand wiring, ALOT more. I’ve been wiring pickups for 7-8 years now but always used a diagram and never really knew why I was going what I was doing…

so this will be a dumb question… does it matter which lug on a pot that you wire something to? Or are they all the same

Yeah I'm still a dummy, but years ago I set out specifically to understand the WHY of wiring guitars so I could fix my problems when I wired it up "perfectly" and still had issues.

https://www.fralinpickups.com/2017/03/03/volume-tone-pots-101/

This might help. I'm not great at explaining pots because I always forget the terms. But yeah it matters. I've never done it before but my guess is that if you flipped the wires on lugs one and three your volume would work on reverse, but I could be wrong.

 

[SonicMustang]

Yeah I'm still a dummy, but years ago I set out specifically to understand the WHY of wiring guitars so I could fix my problems when I wired it up "perfectly" and still had issues.

https://www.fralinpickups.com/2017/03/03/volume-tone-pots-101/

This might help. I'm not great at explaining pots because I always forget the terms. But yeah it matters. I've never done it before but my guess is that if you flipped the wires on lugs one and three your volume would work on reverse, but I could be wrong.

thanks for this Steve. I’ll study up and hopefully have a better understanding. I would love to comprehend it to a level where I at least felt like I knew what I was talking about lol

 

[Steve Holt]

thanks for this Steve. I’ll study up and hopefully have a better understanding. I would love to comprehend it to a level where I at least felt like I knew what I was talking about lol

Remember, the signal comes from the pickup and not the amp. I like to start at each pickup on a diagram and trace it to see where the signal goes and try to understand what's happening. You have to figure out how exactly a switch works too if you don't already know. And which terminals are active in which position. It's all a lot of fun. And there are no dumb questions!

 

[moosie]

does it matter which lug on a pot that you wire something to? Or are they all the same

Yes, it matters. Volume pot uses all three lugs: input, output, and ground. Tone pot uses two lugs. It doesn't matter which order your circuit goes througfh the tone pot, but use the same two lugs.

This might help with the tone pot:

 

[moosie]

I generally think of the signal coming from the pickups, like Steve says, but I start earlier than that, picturing the electrons coming through the common side of the amp, boiling up from ground, into the 'back end' of each pickup (assuming they're connected to ground).

Learn to differentiate ground and common. Ground is just that, the place all electrons sit with zero voltage (zero energy). Common is the half of the circuit that connects to ground. So, your pickup doesn't have a ground wire (except the third wire on a Neck cover). It has a hot (or signal) wire and a common.

This is important when connecting the pickups in other ways, namely series or out of phase. With series, only one pickup's common is grounded. The electrons come from there, go through the coil, pick up the signal, and proceed to the common lead of the other pickup. Then that pickup's hot goes to the output (vol pot usually).

The way I find useful to think about it is that those electrons (lazy bums) only want to get back to ground, the easiest possible way. We herd them through the circuit, and force them to do work on the way back. Like the stream and a water wheel. Give it half a chance, that water will slip around the wheel, avoiding the 'hard' path of pushing the paddle.

Don't get too hung up on all this. It's just how I think about it. There are other ways. Maybe it helps a little, eventually.


Oh, about pots. A lot can be said, but for now just realize that a pot is a pair of resistors, that both change value when the knob is turned. The tone circuit just uses one of the resistors, the one that grows in value as you turn towards '10'. If you connected to the middle lug and the other outside lug, the tone control would work in reverse. But not really, because they're generally not linear, but log, which is how our ears work.

With a vol pot, when you turn up, resistance between output and ground increases (allowing less signal to bleed through and be lost). Simultaneously, resistance between input and output decreases. Turn down, it's the opposite. Not only is the signal blocked from the output, any signal bleeding back is shunted to ground (low resistance).

 

[arlum]

https://guitarelectronics.com/guitar-wiring-resources/2-pickup-guitar-wiring-diagrams/

 

[Tuxedo Poly]

A slight vatiation is to use the volume pot in position 2 to blend the neck in.

 

[Steve Holt]

Yes, it matters. Volume pot uses all three lugs: input, output, and ground. Tone pot uses two lugs. It doesn't matter which order your circuit goes througfh the tone pot, but use the same two lugs.

This might help with the tone pot:

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Moosie,

Thanks for sharing. These are some of the best diagrams I've seen for explaining tone pots. I made sure to save them to my google drive so I'll have them for a rainy day in the future.

I once asked the question here, in my hunt to understand WHY, why strat tone pots are typically not wired identically. It was throwing me for a loop. One tone pot will connect to the cap on the third lug, and the other will connect to the cap on the middle lug. I don't remember the thread to go back and see if someone DID answer the question correctly, but my memory tells me the best answer I got at the time was something like, because you can. Turns out the answer is "it doesn't matter" - which is very similar to "because you can" but doesn't really put the issue to rest. This in particular is very helpful.

 

[Audiowonderland]

I haven’t been able to find a diagram for 2 pickup, 1 volume no tone online. I usually use Seymour Duncan’s website.

I’m using a blade switch. Is it as simple as wiring a tele the normal way and just unsoldering everything that would connect to the tone pot?

Thats all there is to it

 

[old_picker]

after all the years I've followed this forum I am still finding gems - thanks moosie - and others - every way to wire a tone pot in one page

 

[moosie]

after all the years I've followed this forum I am still finding gems - thanks moosie - and others - every way to wire a tone pot in one page

You're welcome. But there are only two ways. 50s and regular. All else is noise with no differences in function.

 

[Lucius Paisley]

Overly simplified. See that lug that isn't being used? Flip the signal connection to the empty lug and the direction of 0-10 is reversed, i.e. "left handed" pot.

Just sayin'.

 

[moosie]

Overly simplified. See that lug that isn't being used? Flip the signal connection to the empty lug and the direction of 0-10 is reversed, i.e. "left handed" pot.

Just sayin'.

Well, just sayin, but it's a rare tone pot that's got a linear taper. With a log taper, it'll be very abrupt with no useful sweep.