- HSH Guitar Wiring
- 5-way Switches
- DIY Amp Building
- Tremolo Setup
- PodXT analysis
- Pickup Comparison
- Recordings
HSH Wiring Mod to HH/SSS 
The Fender Stratocaster and the Gibson Les Paul are two guitars that never have and never will fall out of favour. They cover very different ground in terms of tone, the Strat reigns supreme for crisp, bright, clear tones while the Les Paul has a heavier, fatter, punchier sound. This is down to their use of single-coil and humbucker pickups respectively. Both are great for blues and making the choice between the two camps is difficult - so wouldn't it be great if you could get all this out of one guitar, just from the flick of a switch? This page explains how you can modify a HSH configuration guitar to switch between SSS and HH configurations, greatly expanding the versatility.
Guitar pickups and notation (HH, HSH, SSS, etc.) are explained very well in this article from Wikipedia. Another good place to learn more about guitar electronics is the excellent GuitarNuts website.
Why?
You've got a HSH guitar (or any three pickup guitar for that matter if you want to change the pickups) that you want more versatility from. You wish you could have all the tones of a Les Paul and a Stratocaster in one guitar.
One of my first electric guitars was a Godin SD which I love to bits. It's a HSS guitar and I loved the strat-like sounds from the single-coils and the powerful bridge humbucker. A couple of years later I was lucky enough to buy an American Deluxe Strat (they're a lot cheaper in the States!) and I found there was a lot of similarity between the two guitars' sounds. It felt like the single-coils on the Godin were trying to emulate a Strat, but now I had a great Strat (which does it so much better!). So that got me thinking about changing the Godin pickups...
What?
Given that I had the Strat thing covered, I wanted more punch from the Godin and that got me thinking about single-coil sized humbuckers. Two of the bigger pickup manufacturers, Seymour Duncan and DiMarzio, both produce humbuckers that are sized to fit as single-coil replacements. After listening to the sound files on the Seymour Duncan website I decided to go for a '59 humbucker at the bridge, a Lil'59 humbucker at the neck and a single-coil style Duckbucker* at the middle position to keep some quacky Strat tone available and turn my HSS guitar into a HSH configuration.
* Those of you that know your pickups may know that the Duckbucker is actually a humbucker type pickup and is voiced to sound like a single-coil but with humbucking noise cancellation. In this installation I have treated it exactly as a single-coil type pickup.
Neck: Lil'59 humbucker (mine is black)
Middle: single-coil style Duckbucker (mine is white)
Bridge: '59 humbucker (mine is all black)
OK, so I fitted the pickups and they each had a great sound (the Lil'59's output is very impressive and compares well to the full-sized '59) but there was quite an imbalance between the two humbuckers and the quieter single-coil style Duckbucker, even after experimenting with the pickup heights. Not surprising really, given the specifications of the pickups. Also, I wanted to try coil-taps to get more versatility out of the humbuckers.
I decided I wanted to modify the wiring so that I could have either the two humbuckers on, switched like a Les Paul (HH) with the humbuckers in parallel for the middle position, or coil-tap the humbuckers and switch the resulting three single-coils like a Strat (SSS) with the guitar's 5-way switch. Effectively the guitar would have two modes of operation:
| Selected
pickups |
||
|---|---|---|
| 5-way selector position | Humbucker
mode (HH) |
Single-coil
mode (SSS) |
| 5 |
Neck |
Neck |
| 4 |
Neck||Bridge |
Neck||Middle |
| 3 |
Neck||Bridge | Middle |
| 2 |
Neck||Bridge | Middle||Bridge |
| 1 |
Bridge |
Bridge |
Within each mode the pickups' output levels are well matched to each other giving smooth transitions if you switch position on the 5-way switch mid-song. Note that the output levels in humbucker mode are much louder than in single-coil mode, which can also have its uses.
How?
When you search the web for guitar wiring information and modifications it seems that people have posted just about every conceivable wiring configuration. This idea seemed so obvious to me I thought it must be out there somewhere but, after a few hours of sifting through many websites, I gave up looking. Maybe I just didn't look hard enough? Whatever, I picked up a scrap of paper and started to think about how to make this happen...
In order to understand this modification, you need to be able to understand simple circuit diagrams. Again, the excellent GuitarNuts website can help you out here, this page is a good starting point. The 5-way selector switches used on guitars can take a bit of time to get your head around so check it out and make sure you know what switch you've got (Fender use a different type to just about every other manufacturer) and how it works.
Update - After a few e-mail queries, I've written a brief explanation of how the 5-way switch works.
This modification is achievable by adding one new switch to the guitar. You need a 4-pole changeover switch (also known as a 4-pole double throw, 4PDT, ON-ON), easily available from the likes of Maplin Electronics (I was able to walk into the Maplin shop in Cheltenham and get one on a Sunday afternoon - amazing). You also need to make sure you've got enough room on your guitar to fit such a switch. This should probably involve you taking off the pickguard or cavity cover and checking there's enough room inside the guitar as well as space on the outside. I squeezed my switch in between the volume and tone controls:
The new switch sits between the volume and tone controls - note the knobs and switch cap are off and the pickguard assembly is unscrewed from the body in this photo.
An inside view of the new switch location - note the copper shielding I've added to the back of the pickguard and the control cavity. Not the neatest job in the world but who's ever going to see it? Well, OK, maybe I'll try harder next time...
Update - I've done it again on my new Strat and I did try harder! Check out the job I've done with adhesive copper tape here.
I've drawn out the schematic diagram here.
I've also drawn a wiring layout diagram here.
For a fairly complicated scheme like this, it should be easier to follow the schematic, the layout diagram is a little crowded. Hopefully having both diagrams here will enable those of you who don't feel comfortable with schematics to compare the two and see that there isn't really much difference between schematics and layout diagrams. In schematics, components are drawn in with clearer symbols, enabling you to follow the wiring route through switches, quite important in understanding what's going on here. On the schematic, the original 5-way selector switch is labeled SW1 and the new switch is SW2. SW2 is drawn in the humbucker mode. The logic behind this took me some time to think through so grab a beer, look over the diagram and don't stress too much (the hard part is when you come to actually solder this bad boy together - don't try that under the influence, it'll never work!).
A note on pickup choice - to perform the coil-taps on the humbuckers they each need to have 4 wires, not the older style 2-wire type that doesn't let you tap the coils. If you're thinking of buying new pickups check you're getting the 4-wire type as some pickups are available in both 2-wire and 4-wire versions (this very nearly caught me out when I bought the pickups at the Music Live show in Birmingham, lucky I checked the box contents before I left!).
The main points to understand are described below:
Humbucker mode:
- SW2 is drawn in the humbucker position
- The hot outputs of the bridge and neck humbuckers are routed to the upper pole of SW1 as normal. From here the selected signal is passed to the guitars volume and tone controls not drawn on this diagram).
- The lower pole of SW1 is used to ensure the neck and bridge outputs are only connected together when positions 2,3 or 4 are selected.
- The 4th down (lowest) pole of SW2 ensures this only happens in humbucker mode (otherwise positions 2 and 4 of the single-coil mode would both be Neck||Middle||Bridge).
- The 3rd down pole of SW2 routes this combined output of bridge and neck to the upper pole of SW1 (and then on to the guitar's output) when in humbucker mode.
Single-coil mode:
- With SW2 in the single-coil position, the upper two poles of SW2 perform the coil-tap on the two humbuckers, shorting half of each humbucker to ground. Now we have three single-coils!
- The 3rd down pole of SW2 now brings the middle single-coil into the circuit and routes its output to the upper pole of SW1.
- The 4th down pole (lowest) of SW2 is now broken and ensures that the neck pickup isn't connected to the bridge pickup (the lower pole of SW1 is now redundant).
If you understand basic electronics, can hold a soldering iron the right way round and can figure out the contacts on your 5-way switch, this much information should be enough for you to carry out the mod.
So what...?
The 'so what' of this modification is that I now have a guitar that sounds like a Strat one minute and the next I kick in the humbucker switch and I get some full-on punch requiring a minimum safe distance of 5km. I'm really pleased with my pickup choice too. The '59 at the bridge is really powerful, sends the neighbours running for cover, and when coil-tapped gives a very respectable single-coil sound. The Lil'59 at the neck is a real wonder, it really stands up to its bigger cousin at the bridge and, again, provides a good single coil sound when coil-tapped (though not as good as the full-sized '59 in this respect). The Duckbucker in the middle gives a superb quacky Strat sound (as the name suggests!) and, when combined with the tapped '59s in positions 2 and 4, gives the most awesome funky tones.
Of course this guitar doesn't sound and feel exactly like a top notch Strat or Les Paul but that's not the intention. The Godin SD is a great playing guitar in its own right. This modification expands its vocabulary so that I've got a broad range of tones that can cover just about anything I want to play.
Check it out!
To sort out the extra holes I was left with either side of the bridge humbucker I decided to make myself a new pickguard. I also took this opportunity to move the 5-way selector switch a little further away from the strings as I had a tendency to accidentally flick the switch with my right hand while playing - not good! That's my only criticism of these great guitars. Still, sorted now, and I went for black for the new pickguard to give the guitar a bit of a face lift and a new mean look. Grrrrrrrrrr.
Some more detailed photos can be found here.
Hear it!!
OK, looks are all very well, but that wasn't the point of the exercise... here's what it sounds like!
As with Seymour Duncan's website, in each set of recordings, I've played the same riff into the same amp settings (on my Line 6 PodXT recorded onto my PC) for direct comparison between the pickup selections.
OK, first up is a bluesy lick played into a clean amp setting (if you have a PodXT, download the tone here):
|
Clean |
|
|---|---|---|
| 5-way selector position | Humbucker
mode (HH) |
Single-coil
mode (SSS) |
| 5 |
Neck |
Neck |
| 4 |
Neck||Bridge |
Neck||Middle |
| 3 |
Neck||Bridge | Middle |
| 2 |
Neck||Bridge | Middle||Bridge |
| 1 |
Bridge |
Bridge |
Now for something with a bit more drive. All I've done is add the Pod's "Classic Distortion" stomp box in front of the previous amp settings (download the tone here):
|
Overdrive |
|
|---|---|---|
| 5-way selector position | Humbucker
mode (HH) |
Single-coil
mode (SSS) |
| 5 |
Neck |
Neck |
| 4 |
Neck||Bridge |
Neck||Middle |
| 3 |
Neck||Bridge | Middle |
| 2 |
Neck||Bridge | Middle||Bridge |
| 1 |
Bridge |
Bridge |
It's obviously a lot easier to hear the difference between the pickup settings on the clean demo as there's a lot of colour from the stomp box in the overdrive demo. But I think you can see from both, there's a lot of fun to be had! So what are you waiting for?? If anyone does find this page and carries out this mod, please drop me a line to tell me about what you've done.