Mustang wiring help.

[vojtasTS29]

Hollo guys. Bought a new pg, finally with propper three pos slide switches and I'd love to know how to set my mustang up similarly to what i use now with jaguar switches. I want two volumes, as i use a 250k for my neck single coil and 500k for my bridge paf and never use a tone control. I want the switch above the neck pickup to do the standard mustang things(in, kill and out of phase), but i want the bridge switch to go bridge to neck: "bridge only, straight through the vol pot into the jack"/"both pickups parallel"/"both pickups series". Is this possible? If not i just want the series position to do a killswitch thing.
Thx in advance

[honeyiscool]

To what you're asking, you need to pass at least a lot of wires between control plate and pickguard, so you probably need to enlarge at least the cavity between pickguard and control plate, and the OCD of a serial killer. A master volume/tone is a much simpler way of fitting wiring into a Mustang. That said, even if you could, there's the issue with all this wiring combining to do a lot of weird stuff when you start adding switches to the mix.

But let's stick to the switches for a bit. What you describe with the switches is pretty simple. Kind of weird that you never want to solo your neck pickup, but hey, it's your life. The only issue is that when the neck pickup is off, the "series" option will be entirely off. There's no way to avoid this, but if you're trying to do a "both pickups in series" and you have one of the pickups turned off, you deserve what happens.

So, if you want to do this... you have two switches, right:
A B C D . . . I J K L
E F G H . . . M N O P

When you're looking at this on the pickguard, then the A-H switch is next to the neck pickup and the I-P switch is next to the bridge pickup. Always remember that, because I've actually wired to the wrong switch before because it's upside down.

So, the neck pickup switch is pretty simple. It's wired just like a Mustang. The bridge pickup switch is where things change. So here are some step by step instructions:

1. Connect Neck+ to B, and wire a short jumper from B to C.
2. Connect Neck- to F, and wire a short jumper from F to G.
3. Connect E to D, and connect a longer wire from D (not connected yet, we'll get to it later), leave about 10 cm or 4". This is the "hot" wire from the neck phase switch.
4. Connect A to switch casing for grounding, and then A to H, and leave some wire from H (not connected yet, we'll get to it later), about 10 cm or 4". This is the "ground" wire from the neck phase switch.
5. Connect Bridge+ to I, and wire a short jumper from I to J, then a long wire to the control plate from J. This is your overall output hot wire.
6. Connect Bridge- to N, and wire a jumper from N to P, taking care to make to make sure that you're leaving O accessible. Connect short jumper from P to L.
7. Take that wire from D, cut it to size, and wire it to M, and wire a short jumper from M to K.
8. Take that wire from H, cut it to size, and wire it to O, then a long wire to the control plate from O. This is your overall output ground wire. You can also ground the switch from O, but this is unnecessary as your pickguard should be grounded (via continuity to H) already if you followed my instructions.

If, despite all my warnings, you still want to do that thing with the individual volumes, then here's what you do. Disconnect D to M. Connect a long wire from D to the input of the neck volume pot and a long wire from M to the output of the neck volume pot. Meanwhile, remove Bridge+ to I, then connect Bridge+ to the bridge volume pot (will most likely need to heat shrink yourself an extension), then wire that to the input of the bridge volume pot, then wire the output of the bridge volume pot to the I. Now the overall output hot wire goes direct to the jack. So what's that, four additional wires to span the gap. To save yourself a bit of sanity, and to make this even possible, what you'd want to do is you'd want some 4-conductor pickup wire, the kind that companies like Seymour Duncan use. That gives you 4 wires within one flexible shell, and the shield of the wire can be used to pass the ground, so you only need one more signal wire, which I'd suggest would be the Bridge+ extension. Then, you'd be able to do this with two physical things in between the cavity and pickguard. You'd still need the patience of a saint and the OCD of a serial killer, and possibly a bit of light routing. And for what? Who knows if it'll even work that well. And then every time you try to repair the wiring, you're going to curse yourself a second time.

[vojtasTS29]

Thank you very much, i would never expect such an in depth look at my problem:) But i got impatient, and in the end i just wired the switch above the bridge pickup as a killswitch and did the control plate pretty much like a reversed jazz bass, just with the pots mismatched. The switch above the neck pickup does it's usual thing... I had pretty much the same setup with jag switches before.

[robroe]

honeyiscool just had the post of the year so far.

this might be HOF thread in 3 posts