Thinking of Moving from 3-Pickups to 2, but with 5-Way Custom Switching

[Butch Snyder]

Hey all, I have a Telecaster that has an HSS pickup config.

Neck - Duncan Pearly Gates humbucker
Middle - Duncan Alnico 2 Pro Strat pickup
Bridge - Duncan Alnico 2 Pro Tele bridge pickup

I'm kind of feeling a little "meh" about the pickup config. It's wired like a Strat. I have a Jerry Donahue Tele control assembly. I could lose the Pearly Gates and move the Strat pickup to the neck position and do the JD wiring. Thoughts? Here is the Donahue switching. It's not like his old Fender Telecaster. The wiring is like his G&L, Peavey, Fret King, and Vintage brand signature guitars.

SWITCHING POSITIONS (as described in Jerry Donahue’s own colorful words):

Pos 1 – The solo bridge pickup with the gutsy lead sound of the very best ’50s Telecasters.
Pos 2 – Combines both pickups with a capacitor and resistor to create a controlled degree of reversed phase. This offers a Stratocaster’s popular “in-between quack tone.”
Pos 3 – The neck and bridge pickups in a custom parallel wiring. This produces an enhanced, contemporary version of a Telecaster’s traditional middle-position tone.
Pos 4 – The neck pickup with a special capacitor engaged. This yields a tone ordinarily associated with an archtop jazz guitar. Add overdrive to capture that classic late-’60s “woman tone.”
Pos 5 – The rich and sparkling neck position of a traditional Stratocaster, resulting in that unmistakable vintage single-coil sound that echoes the soaring, majestic blues tones of the ’60s and ’70s.

Interested in thoughts and opinions.

 

[Robnik33]

Go for it! If you are handy with a soldering iron, changing the wiring is a great way to explore other tone combinations.

No experience with that particular setup, but given JDs tone, definitely worth a try.

I’m a big fan of a 5 way Strat switch on standard Teles and Wilde Bill Lawrence wiring. You get the standard 3 Tele positions, plus a Strat-ish phase shifted tone and a neck position with reduced bass.

What is it about the current setup you don’t like? You could also try different capacitors in your current setup for tone shaping before you switch to something else.

 

[Butch Snyder]

I have plenty of experience in wiring and wiring configs. That part is easy. I guess the main thing is the humbucker is a bit too warm for my looking. Although, when I move my apm's EQ settings to noon, it obviously sounds a bit brighter. The JD wiring would provide a "cleaner" look and get the middle pickup out of the way.

 

[jvin248]

...the main thing is the humbucker is a bit too warm...

Lower the humbucker and raise the screw poles, highest 3/16th inch, match the poles to the classic Strat 'stagger' pattern. This will give you a brighter humbucker and more of a Strat tone; classic stagger has been recorded with modern strings for so many songs that while the stagger 'is not right' for the strings they output 'sounds right'. Just like 'why are barns red, because red paint was cheaper, because so many barns were painted red'.

If that is not enough, then use a series cap (0.047uF is a good first try) on the muddy pickup hot lead. That will brighten it up and eliminate muddiness. I find most SD pickups are muddy and these are the fixes.

.

 

[TomBrokaw]

That's a pretty cool idea, to hardwire the capacitor into a position.

If you haven't already, I'd suggest trying the humbucker wired in parallel. I've never played that specific pickup, so ymmv, but I have a couple of guitars with mini switches on each HB for Series/SC/Parallel, and I never use the SC position because the Parallel does (close enough to) the same thing without the buzz. It's not identical of course.