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Welcome to my DIY project. It's an older guitar that I inherited from my father-- a 1965 Gibson/Epiphone Olympic Special. I have some questions, but I also thought you all might be interested to see my project in action. You can view the wiring schematic here.
First, some history. The guitar was already heavily modified before I got my hands on it. I'm not sure who, but it was probably my father, put in a whammy bar below the bridge, and "routed out" (crudely, with a 1" drill bit) part of the body to install a three-way DPDT center off switch near the fretboard. I have no idea what this was intended for, or even how it was originally configured, because a few years ago, I opened her up and started crudely tearing it apart. I replaced the stock tone potentiostat with one I bought, and messed some other stuff up.
Now I've decided to fix it. Armed with the superior knowledge of the internet, I went to Radio Shack and got an assortment of capacitors, resistors, a spool of wire, and a shiny new box of baby alligator clips. I've spent the last 2 days doing little but reading, soldering, and testing.
The guitar has:
- One stock volume pot (has a nice "click" when completely off, love it)
- One B-type after-market pot for tone (should I replace this with an A-type?)
- One stock SPDT "two-way" switch
- One after-market DPDT center-off "three way (but not really)" switch
- One relatively new jack
- One stock single-coil pickup
Since I only have one pickup, the main problem is what to do with all these switches. I've already put in a high-pass filter on the two-way switch, and I'm satisfied with the way it sounds. It's a 10 nF capacitor in parallel with a 22 kOhm resistor, and cuts out a lot of the lower frequencies when I flick it on. It sounds like I've turned the tone to eleven. For the two "on" positions on the three-way switch, I had intended to 1) put in a treble bleed capacitor to brighten it up at low volume, and 2) another capacitor in parallel with the main tone capacitor to cut out even more highs with the tone control. However, I'm having a bit of trouble, so I have a couple of questions.
- I cannot hear ANY difference when the treble bleed cap is active, at any volume, at any capacitance from 10 nF to 1 pF. It's a pretty bright guitar even at low volume, so the value of having a treble bleed cap is questionable. But what else can I do with the three-way switch? Am I just using the wrong capacitance? Should I try some other combination of resistors and capacitors?
- The tone control is still pretty bad. Definitely not the variation of tone I'd hoped for, even with the two caps in parallel. Should I keep playing around with capacitance values until I get it right? One thing to note, the tone pot is 500 kOhm, while the volume pot is only 10 kOhm. Will that affect anything?
- The tone pot is B-type (linear). It sounds like it's doing nothing, until you get it almost to zero, and then it kicks in quite suddenly. If I switch it out with an A-type, will it make it sound more natural, or will it make it worse?
Thanks in advance,
Azzy