[Metal Ken]

Originally Posted by stubhead

I have been playing forever - Mahavishnu & Morse are my biggies - I mostly write and work on technique these days. I just bought a cheap Ibanez AX7221 and the improvement in hand positioning is amazing. It's not so much about having the low string as it is about what it does for playing on the top strings. The Ibanez is irredeemably twanky, no point is sinking anything into it. I'm going to build another Warmoth, 7 strings with EMGs and a Kahler whammy if I can find somebody to SELL me the darn whammy. My main guitars are two homebuilt Warmoths, mostly a "Tele" with a scalloped ebony fretboard and rocket science electronics. I have just this year pulled my head out of Morse & Bach's S&P for solo violin & Paganini's Caprices long enough to pick up on Petrucci and Paul Gilbert - Hey, where'd THOSE guys come from?

Hey, welcome aboard.

Mahavishnu Orchestra is AMAZING. \m/

[stubhead]

i'm interested in hearing about the rocket science electronics

My swamp ash "Tele" started with a Lawrence L500R in the bridge (standard power humbucking), and a Lawrence L280TN neck single coil pickup wired with a 3-way switch and master volume & tone controls. It has a scalloped ebony fretboard on an extra-wide 1 3/4" boatneck. I think because of the size and weight of the neck, it sounded twanky with 009's and even 010's - negating the point of the scalloped fretboard. So, I rewired it with an extreme high-powered heavy metal pickup, the Bill Lawrence L500XL - the "Dimebag Darrell" pickup, Duncan stole the design but Bill Lawrence doesn't care about that stuff. (He owns patents on so much of the pickup manufacturing techniques and equipment that he makes a few cents off of virtually every guitar sold, plus his licensing fees on all the new noiseless Fenders, plus patent fees from PRS, etc.). I used this diagram to wire a "SuperSwitch" for the L500XL pickup alone: one coil, both coils in series, parallel, of out-of phase, and the other coil:
TDPRI - wiring a 5-way SuperSwitch

The key to using that diagram is to just treat each coil of the humbucking as the separate pickups on the Tele. The output from that switch goes to a concentric volume/tone pot, the single-coil neck pickup goes to another concentric volume/tone pot, then these each go to another 3-way switch and out. This lets me use any combination of coils, blended at any volume. Because the L500XL is so powerful, the volume from the tapped single coils hold their own against the Lawrence L280 neck pickup. With the separate volume controls, I can dial in Strat quack precisely, as well as do anything a four-knob Gibson setup will do. Wiring the little jumpers within the SuperSwitch is a bitch - it took 6 hours and a whole pot of coffee, and I was blind and crazy for a whole day after. On a practical basis, I usually just use the first three positions on the Superswitch, the parallel humbucking is particularly useful. I usually leave the three-way in the middle position and just change the relative pickup volumes up and down, the old Duane Allman approach.

It can do pretty much anything that can be done with these three coils, fairly efficiently. The other approach to get more options would be to have separate volumes for each coil, three parallel/series switches and a master tone (or two tones), but that'd be slow onstage, I think.