Pickup wiring help needed

[conky]

I went ahead and took the EMG out of my ESP because I can't stand it. I found a 500k audio taper pot laying around so I figured I'd go ahead and wire it up while waiting on the Black Winter to come in. I put the bridge humbucker that came with my Jazzmaster in it. Its not great by any means but it sounds a lot better than the active EMG. One thing though, the pot is scratchy when I roll down / up the volume. Contact cleaner will probably fix that. The biggest problem is that unless I'm touching the volume knob I get a lot of hum.

There is a wire screwed to the body under the pickup that was wired to the original pot ( I assumed it was the ground) and one more in the cavity that is coming from (im guessing) the bridge that has the end folded over with heat shrink tubing on it. Should I solder that to the pot too? I'm using the 1 pickup, 1 volume wiring diagram from Seymour Duncan.

[Ancient Astronaught]

Yes you need to solder the bridge ground to the back of the pot. If the hum doesn't go away when you touch the strings or bridge that is the missing link.

[conky]

Yes you need to solder the bridge ground to the back of the pot. If the hum doesn't go away when you touch the strings or bridge that is the missing link.

See thats what was confusing me. With the active setup, it was just in the cavity folded over and the end covered in heat shrink tubing so I thought the wire that was screwed into the body was the ground wire. Are there two grounds in there? I ordered another pot along with the Black Winter so the whole thing will get redone when they get here. I'll go in and

[Ancient Astronaught]

Yeah active pickups don't use a bridge ground wire but they install the wire at the factory just in case some one wants to swap the EMG's out. It's not common but not uncommon either to have two grounds especially if the cavity is shielded, alot of offset players do this to reduce noise.

[conky]

That was the culprit. Took the heat shrink off and soldered it to the pot and it cleared up all the noise. Now I'm just waiting on the new pickup to get here and wondering if coil tapping would be worth it. I've got a switch that I might work laying around somewhere. I'll have to look. I had an SG with one pickup that had a coil tap on it and it sounded pretty nice.

[misterstomach]

I like just wiring straight to the output jack. No pots holding me back.

[conky]

I like just wiring straight to the output jack. No pots holding me back.

I never use a tone pot at all. I do like the volume though so I can fade feedback / distortion in or out.

[Pepe]

I never use a tone pot at all. I do like the volume though so I can fade feedback / distortion in or out.

Don't underestimate the usefulness of the tone potentiometer. I also did that years ago, but some fuzz or dirt pedals produce completely different sounds if you turn the tone knob to the minimum position and that can be pure fun.

[conky]

I do this sometimes with the neck pickup with my Les Paul (Which I never use a neck pickup either) when I'm messing around at home. Sounds cool sometimes but then I just mess with my other fuzz on my board and tweak it to sound like that without having to spent time rolling the volume down.

Recording I can see it being really useful, but in a live setting I just go with the bridge pickup and the tone knob all the way up all the time.

[misterstomach]

I actually have a switch wired in so it's either run straight to the jack or through the volume pot, in case I want to do a swell or fade out. It's also kind of cool cause it can act as a kill switch if I have the volume all the way down. I was inspired Neil young's wiring and an article with his guitar tech about how much pots drag on your signal.

[morange]

Yeah guitar pickups sound different depending on the load they're driving. Not a bad thing, just a thing.

[misterstomach]

Oh, yeah. I'm not saying that no one should have pots. I just like it that way. Honestly, the difference between having the volume pot in the chain and out of it is not very significant. It probably wouldn't have been worth doing except that I had fun doing it and was curious about it. I like it on my guitar, but I'm not running around telling everyone it's a life changing mod or anything.

[morange]

Oh yeah, I've thought about it myself. Cool that you have control over the load on your pickups, based on what you plug into. You could even make a passive load box, just like, a 1M pot wired as a variable resistor to ground, to adjust your sound.