HSH Guitar wiring help

[John McClane]

Hi all,

This is my first post so please go easy on me

I'm trying to decide on wiring options for a HSH guitar that hasn't been routed yet so I can be pretty flexible. I want it to be as versatile as possible while still being practical.

My thoughts so far are:

Master volume and tone that will control the two humbuckers. Each one would be push/pull to split the coils on the humbuckers.
One blend pot to control the mix between the two humbuckers. This could potentially be push/pull to switch the two humbuckers between series/parallel. As far as I am aware, this isn't practical with humbuckers, but that as the coils can be split on both, they could essentially be used in parallel as single coils.

The middle single coil would then have a push/pull volume knob to control the volume and reverse the phase in relation to the two humbuckers.

My understanding is that this would eliminate the need for a pickup switch as each pickup is can be switched on/off using the volume and/or blend pots.

Basically, I'm looking for feedback on whether this setup is feasible/practical or if there are any suggestions that you would do differently.

Thanks

[David King]

Welcome to the MIMF John. This is basically what a modern bass guitar uses. The problem is that you have THREE pickups instead of two so you end up with a much more involved wiring while trying to get every possible combination of tones. What you should know is that most of those tones are going to sound basically the same and most won't be terribly compelling anyway. If you found a good setting then you'd have to work at finding it again the next time so it becomes terribly impractical when trying to be a responsible musician.
I'd start with one of the many common and popular HSH schematics and see what that gets you. If you think it's lacking then you can evolve it towards the ideal.
Blend pots are a great idea in theory but they are too many paths to ground which will suck the life out of most pickups especially on a guitar. What you really care about are the extremes that your set-up is capable of. The in-betweens are pretty useless. You could use a 5 way super strat switch to give you a lot of extremes at the flip of a switch hence repeatable in a hurry. Tell us the brands of the pickups in question and we can help track down the proper wiring diagrams and wire color codes.

[John McClane]

Thanks for the response, David. I wasn't aware that blend pots were a bad idea on a regular guitar. It sounded like a nice idea so I had considered it. I wanted to try something a little different - glad now that you've set me straight.
I will look into the more commonly used HSH schematics.
Thanks again.

[David King]

You can easily mimmic the sound of 2 blend pots and a V and T by switching a 20k resister across your output to ground. If you like what you hear it could be a perfectly viable way to proceed.

[Rodger Knox]

I agree with David that complex controls are not good for a gigging musician, and many of the options are not really desirable anyway.
On the other hand, if the instrument is primarily for recording, that may be a different story.
I will say that the first electric I built had the most complex controls, and now I use a selector switch, one volume, and one tone.