Thursday, February 3, 2011

Hot Telecaster Project (with humbuckers)

In this post I would like to show you a Telecaster guitar wiring project, made especially for heavy rock and metal enthusiasts. It's based on two, single-coil sized humbuckers (like SD Hot Rails) in a Tele body.

Diagram:

The pickup wire colors are based on Seymour Duncan's coding.
In the rest of wiring:
brown = ground;
red and black = hot;
yellow = tone control.

How it works?

Potentiometer

The hot wire goes from the pickup selector right to the volume pot. This is the only potentiometer it the wiring. I decided to make a single pot project because of good treble response (less treble bleeding) of these circuits. It's quite popular in electric guitars designed for metal music. It will give more distinct and crisper tone than a typical, two-pot wiring.

Tone control

Like I wrote before, it's a single-pot wiring, so the tone control need to be based on a switch. I chose the SPDT on-on switch, which can connect/disconnect the tone capacitor with the hot line.
It's a 3,3nF cap. With this value, we will be able to make the guitar tone fatter. It's not so great for clean tones, but will work very good with some distortion.

As you can see, I placed the wiring parts inversely – the volume pot is first on the plate, and the pickup selector is on the and. It's a good idea for making a Telecaster wiring. In this way, we will get the volume knob closer to hand.

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This wiring project is a good way to go for those, who would like to make a metal music axe from a classic Tele guitar. It will give a very distinct, crisp and strong signal.