Strat Renovation - Beaten & Battered (Pics on page 2!)

[Moose]

Ahh right!

Well the more I play around with it, the more convinced I am that it's the neck pup that's out of phase. But it's not too big a deal to swap around the wires really, so I'll do that at some point.

I'll try swapping over the wires on the neck pickup first, then see how that affects things

Thanks for the advice though man, appreciate it! Plus I didn't know that stuff about Fender pups & SD pups, really useful!



Also, what does YMMV mean? This is not an acronym I am familiar with

[Chankgeez]

Your Mileage May Vary.

Pickups may also be magnetically out of phase, not just electrically out of phase.

Also, sometimes it's tricky when using different types of pickups. There may be an imbalance in output.

(Like spacelordmother, I'm not certain these things may be what's wrong with your guitar. Worth investigating though.)

[Moose]

Ahhh cool, thanks.

Yeah I know, that's a concern I have. I don't believe they are magnetically out of phase, and I certainly hope they aren't. From what I understand, remedying magnetically out of phase pickups is a bit of a nightmare!

And yeah I figure about the output, especially when it comes to whether they are run in series or parallel. Oh well. Just have to tweak around with it and just see what happens I guess!



EDIT: Just done some research. With single coils, magnetically out of phase isn't too big an issue, as it's still the same remedy of swapping wires.

[Moose]

So I started hunting online to see what I could find to fix this, came across a very useful tip for determining which pickup is out of phase on the Bareknuckle pickups forum:

Do you have a multimeter? If so, do the following: plug in a guitar cord and put one test probe to the tip and one probe to the ring. Take some needle nose pliers (or a screwdriver) and put it on top of the middle pickup. Select the middle pickup on the toggle switch. You should now get the ohms reading for the middle pickup. Now, remove the needle nose pliers and watch the multimeter. Does it go up or down (or right or left)? Now do the same with the bridge pickup. If the meter goes in the same direction they are in phase - if it goes in different directions they are out of phase.

Extremely useful! By doing this I have confirmed that it is indeed the neck pickup that is out of phase

So now I just need to swap the wires of the toaster round when I get round to fixing it! Additionally I've gone over my scribbled drawings for the wiring diagram and realised I've done something impressively stupid that effects the sound massively:

When the two single coils are on, they operate in series. However, the bridge pickup is wired in parallel to the other pickups. Whoops Fuck it, it's all a learning curve!

[Chankgeez]

Good that you got it more or less figured out though.

[Moose]

Yeahhh, and the more I think about it, the way I've wired it actually makes sense.

Usually on conventional strat wiring, positions 2 & 4 tend to be in parallel, which is part of what gives the strat it's classic sound.

So this totally works for me. All I need to do is swap the wires on the toaster and it's as it should be.


Then, finally, I'll get off my ass and do a video demo of it