how to blend in neck p/u on a tele?

[Fluoroscope 5000]

I see how the no-load pot functions for you here. I actually misunderstood the way it would work. You can use it, but you might get a more piercing bridge PUP sound with the resulting more pronounced resonance peak. It's actually not uncommon to wire over more resistance for a bridge Tele PUP even with 2 x 250k pots in the circuit. How pronounced the peak will be depends on the PUP and the cable capacitance. I'd think about wiring the blend for the combined pos only, and wiring over different resistors for each PUP. If you are set on finding a fixed blend setting for the P/P, consider that the circuit resonant frequency and level goes up as the PUP's are blended, but hardly changes at all with less than, let's say, ~100k resistance in front of the blend PUP. There could easily be a strong upper-mid peak that can create a nice sparkle or brittleness, depending a lot on the bridge PUP and the capacitance load. You may want to wire a resistor over the blend pot.

I figure it's best to have a knob for each PUP position, but combining one for a few positions can work great too. A master tone requires to be adjusted for each position, whereas dedicated knobs could potentially be set for each song. You could even wire up the P/P pot as a HOoP option with a ~2nF cap. A Super Switch would open up some per position options as well, but we are getting complicated.

The dual pot blend is a perfectly good idea. The point is to wire the PUP's as if they are tone caps, so you'll have control over the subtle blend range from 1~7 on the knob. Otherwise, the blend PUP will drop in volume abruptly from 10~7 with not much control over subtleties. I configured a P/P to swap blend PUP's on one blend knob for a Strat type.

[SpareRibs]

Get a 5-way Super switch and we can really have some fun! You could have the bridge, bridge and blended neck, bridge and neck in series (possibly blendable!), bridge and neck in parallel, and neck only. Maybe be able to blend a little bridge into the neck position. A couple of push pull pots and the possibilities are endless.

Hello,
You can get a 4 pole 5 position rotary switch from Guitar Electronics. There is one on this guitar. It was a Les Paul Special II. At each end is volume and tone. The middle knob is the rotary switch, where the original selector switch was. It treats the two single coil pickups as one humbucker.
The positions are as follows. (1) Series in Phase, Both pickups in humbucker mode. (2) Single coil North, Neck. (3) Parallel in Phase (4) Single South, Bridge.
(5) Series out of Phase
If you know more than I do about wiring you could probably get it to do what you want. I just followed the instructions that came with the switch. However the possibilities are limitless.

[TimmyP1955]

Remove cap in input wire from the tone pot.

Remove the hot wire of the neck pickup from the switch.

Connect the hot wire of the neck pickup to the wiper of the former tone pot.

Feed the end of the former tone pot to the switch tab that you took the pickup wire off of.


When turned down, the neck pickup's volume control will ground the pickup (instead of the pot's - and thus both pickups' - output). The lower the level is set, the less bright the pickup will be, which may or may not be to your liking.

[SpareRibs]

Hello,
You can install a push pull pot in place of the tone control. Using half for a blender, the other half for tone control.

[bbsailor]

You can use a stacked or concentric volume control (two controls in one hole) to adjust the volume of each pickup but with a minor wiring change. Use the controls as a variable resistor like this.
1. Put the pickup hot wire on the center lug of the stacked volume pot (your choice of upper pot contacts or lower pot contacts).
2. Place the ground pickup lead to the outer lug (the one that is closer to zero ohms when turned fully counter clock wise).
3. Take the volume output to the selector switch from the other outer pot lug.

Now you can blend the pickups individually by adjusting the upper pot knob or the lower pot knob. This way each pickup can be adjusted individually and not be combined when in parallel (or in series with the new 4 position selector switch).

If you want to really get more sounds try this additional modification.

1. Replace the three position selector switch with a (new) 4 position pickup selector switch which adds two pickups in series to the traditional other selections (neck, bridge or both in parallel).
2. Remove the ground connection from the neck pickup metal case and reground it with a separate wire from the pickup metal case to the output ground or a nearby grounded pot (shorter is better).
3. Replace the traditional tone pot with a push pull pot that allows you to flip the neck pickup phase when two pickups are selected either in the parallel mode or serial mode (with the new 4 position pickup selector switch).
4. Play the guitar with either the series or parallel 2-pickup setting out or phase (using the push pull tone pot in the out of phase mode) and adjust one volume control about one tenth of a turn and listen to a variable notch effect to get some interesting sounds.

This can all be done with no modifications to the Telecaster metal mounting plate or be visible from a distance or affect the value of your vintage instrument as it can be restored using original parts easily.

Many professional guitarists enjoy this easy Telecaster mod. I discovered this during my 55 years of guitar tinkering.

Enjoy this new mod!!!

Joseph J. Rogowski

P.S. Try using a 500K concentric pot for this mod.