Wiring Madness

Okay, I have this crazy idea that I want to explore, I'm just wondering what "gotchas" I may be missing.

I have in my possession three PAIRS of J pups (six singles) that I want to put into a bass along with many ON-ON-ON and ON-ON switches and a pair of 5-way blade switches.

The idea is to put them in hum cancelling pairs at the Neck, Mid, and Bridge positions.

I'm considering two different wiring configs because of this:

1) Handle each Hum cancelling pair with switches before incorporating them in into the rest of the chain. This means each Pair will have a switch for N/Series (or Parallel)/S selection, feeding into an On/Off switch wired so that if all 3 are "Off" you don't get the dreaded "unplugged" static.

Pros: possible to isolate any pickup of pickup combination.

Cons: with a DPDT, can only choose 3 of the 4 obvious wiring options. So I can isolate one coil or the other and then do series or parallel, but not all 4. For all the flexibility there would be a lot of options may not be useful in any context or flat-out redundant.

Complicated but flexible.


2) Wire three of the pups of the same winding/polarity to each 5-way blade switch so that each blade acts like a Strat blade (sans hum cancelling) and then join there signals to a switch for overall series/parallel between the blades.

Pros: MUCH simpler interface. All combinations would be hum cancelling.

Cons: Some pickup combinations would not be possible due to limitations of 5-way switch. I would never actually be able to isolate a single pickup coil, there would always be a minimum of 2 (thought theoretically always humcencelling)


What could go wrong, right?

My first thought is with (1) is to not worry so much about isolating both coils in switching and do <pick a coil>/Series/Parallel switching which may lead to some combinations not hum cancel, but increase tonal options.

I'm cutting a custom PG so I'm thinking I may even make a section swappable so that with a little effort I could just swap the section with switches out to experiment with the options.

Any thoughts?

 

I guess the "happy medium" would be to have the 3 pairs wired to DPDT switches which wire to a single 5-way...

 

These are the things I was trying to understand. So if you have three coils in play and only one of them is RWRP in relation to the other two, it would only partially hum cancel?

 

Hooboy, I'mma run out of real estate... I was already considering have the neck pups further from the strings than the bridge to balance, but I was going to epoxy the pairs (i.e. make cheap double Js), sounds like I might need to think it out a little bit more.

Thanks

 

Right, I mean these were $11/pair on Ebay so I'm not expecting a ton of consistency...

 

This is starting to sound like I should worry less about hum cancelling unless I want to complicate the wiring or limit the options in order to prevent the potential for mismatches.

 

I thought that, being as cheap as they are, I know they are not physically sized differently like J pups were at one point so it could literally be that they only differ in being RWRP in relation one another which would actually be good for me...

 

Right, like picking the "outer" coils to humcancel and be further apart for a more diverse sampling.

 

Just checked and there is a difference but we are talking millimeters. and the pup covers are closed so you'd only see it at the edges of the pups and that means you won't notice the difference unless you are right on top of them.

 

It's honestly more of the latter... I was interested this EB bass that had 3 pickups (I forget the model now) but there was a lot of underlying technology to it that I wouldn't be able to reproduce, but the idea stuck with me of could I build something with a lot of tone options, but then I started going down the rabbit hole of simplifying the controls...

The more I think about it, the more it seems like having a dedicated DPDT switch for each pup pair and then run the three resulting signals through a 5-way would probably cover options w/o creating too much redundancy or complexity.