“Only they who believeth in their guitar quest shall be granted passage”

Category: Wiring and Pickups

four humbuckers pickup wiring diagram – all hotrails and quadrail

Recently i installed my spare pickups to my Fernandes FR 55, they are Duncan Designed hotrails pickups and a quadrail pickup(brand unknown). It is temporary until i get the pickups i want,though. but here’s some problems i encounter when i installed them:

– can’t find the right phase for all pickups

– cable colors are confusing

well, it’s actually only two problems, but i spent the whole day to get the right phase for these pickups. you can solve this problem with an AVOmeter, but since i don’t have it, i have to try it one-by-one with cablejacks and miniamp to test the connectivity.

and this is what i got from that:

FYI: i forgot to draw the unwrap cable output from pickups, but i solder them all to ground. and consider that some unknown brand using different cable color for hot and ground. this was my real problem with the unknown brand quadrail pickup.. it has the same cables colors, but when i connected them according to seymour duncan cable coding, it is gone out of phase. the pickup wiring diagram above is exactly what I’ve done to get the right phase.

the sound i got from that pickup wiring diagram:

i use the coiltap to split all the pickups. so in lifted-coiltap, i have S-S-H pickups formation. AND, in pushed-coiltap, i have the H-H-HH pickups formation.

the output is actually awesome, BUT, my pickups are the default factory ones, so, their sound quality isn’t that good. can’t get more clarity, since the default pickups usually are average-to-bad pickups. it’s muddy, but i can overcome that with compression pedal.

but, i tell you, this could be awesome if you have high-quality hotrails and quadrail pickups. the hum-cancelling works perfectly. there are no noise on my guitar sound output. the tone is actually hum-free with very good sustain. but i need better hotrails and quadrail, though, to get the wood tone comes out of my guitar. (my fernandes is maple neck and mahogany body, tough one)

August 20, 2014
and i destroyed my guitar pickups! – fail guitar pickups wax potting

well, this is embarrassing. i read some pickups modification and had decided to do pickups wax potting. actually it was my fault. i just didn’t get the thermometer and my wax was overheat. here i share you the fail guitar pickups wax potting pics:

they are destroyed Fernandes pickups. the plastic shrunk and i totally fucked up this time. they are not in reversible shapes. but one thing that interested me.

Fernandes pickups destroyed after wax-potting, only G&L pickup were survived

from all those destroyed pickups, there is one survivor. i have a G&L pickup which is not affected by the heat.. it is in great shape and ready. it was the same process since I’ve put them together in the same time and duration.

from this DIY guitar stuff this is my worst ever. actually i kept the wax in moderate heat.. but the pickups plastic material just couldn’t stand up against the heat. well, thanks to G&L pickup which stand by my side. it is tough enough to defend me against the shrunk pickups case.

it’s a hard lesson for me. and all i can conclude are:
– depends on what kind of pickup plastic materials, wax potting could be freakin dangerous to your pickups.
– MAKE SURE THE HEAT IS APPROPRIATE. it’s 65 degree Celsius or better below. don’t worry about pickup magnetism against the heat. i did this and check the magnet were totally fine. you need to pay attention more to pickups plastic material.
– be ready to buy new guitar pickups. if you’re in low budget, postpone the wax potting until you get enough money to cover your loss.
– if you consider your pickups are antique, just let them be. or you can take the chance to be like me, who curious about any guitar stuff.

well, since I’m a curious guy, I’m gonna put those destroyed pickups into my guitar (my first guitar, which become my lovable experiment objects.

shoot, it was a big failure but i feel so HAPPY … this is what I’m talking about in guitar learning process.
August 16, 2014
Problem solution possibilites for humming Pickups

what makes me wonder is, how all virtuosos can be hum-free? i have an old 90’s Fernandes guitar which has noise-pickups. it is HSS and still i couldn’t find solution possibilities for this until couple hours ago. this is what i got so far in searching the hum problem for my guitar Fernandes FR-55. it’s been over a year ago and finally i got the closest possible solution on this.at very first i thought it was the circuitry. so i learn about soldering the components and find out what caused the hum. as far as i could get before the next one is 60Hz cycle hum. It’s called “60 Hz cycle hum” because it’s a signal that oscillates at 60 Hertz – sixty cycles a second. too complicated, why is it audible, since 60 Hz is so low in frequency range? here’s why. we can hear it because it cycles, its harmonic notes is what we heard. 60, 120, 240, 480, 960, 1920, 3840, 7680, 15360, 30720,.. there we can hear them all ringing loudly. creating ground loop is the very first idea in my mind for my guitar, and hum cancelling with humbucker pickups came to next.
but, it against the fact that my guitar is HSS which means i got humbucker, why is it still humming?so i went deeper search about it and still, i couldn’t find the solution. I’ve double-checked the soldering part and grounding, and my fernandes was very neat and i couldn’t take soldering/grounding as the main problem. (it’s japan-made and its circuitry is one of the most neat working i’ve ever seen). even i considered to change the pickups, while i know my fernandes pickups sounds good actually , no need to replace the pickups with the expensive one (Seymour Duncan® works best on my spalted maple tele, but…it means more $$$!!!! ) …the best thing i got so far from learning soldering and grounding is how to keep bright tone when guitar volume knob is being lowered.

if i just could remove the hum…
then, out of nowhere (actually like something already deep inside was screaming).. i had a thought to do modification on pickups and DIY pickups making, and i began to analyze what exactly was wrong with my Fernandes. I’ve written it on paper somewhere which i lost it now, but here they are:

– my humming pickups can’t stand the high gain
– it has very low noise in clean tones, but it gets humming when i raised the amp volume
– when i had fun with the whammy bar, the guitar springs sound creaking into pickups
– when i knocked the body, the pickups deliver the knocking sound, louder than my other guitars

it’s like my pickups act like a microphone. so i whine to Google , just write these words “guitar pickups act like microphone!”

and the miracle came.. this guitar-pickup-act-like-microphone problem is called microphonic feedback, which is unacceptable for pickups. a normal pickups will deliver the strings vibration only, and that is what should happen, it is just the very basic idea for guitar pickups.

back to my pickups problem which has the very similar symptoms, the best solution for my fernandes problem is pickups potting. the idea is to wrap the pickups with wax in order to make them in fixed position, so they can’t vibrate and deliver sound other than guitar strings vibration.

now i know exactly what I’m gonna do this time for my Fernandes FR-55. i’ll get the “pickups potting process” into preparation right away. hopefully it works. wish me luck

August 14, 2014
how to keep bright tone when guitar volume knob is being lowered

Recently i found something interesting on the internet. something that bothers me all these years and left unanswered. when we play some blues, the volume knob is the key of music dynamics. Anyone would never get satisfied by the mumbling tone when we reduce the volume via guitar volume knob to get less distorted tone in creating smooth clear overdrive sound. and now i got the one of solution on how to keep bright tone when guitar volume knob is being lowered.

to accomplish that, i needed to go to local radio shack in my town and bought a 0.001 uF capacitor and 150k resistor. it was too cheap, so i bought three of each so i can install them on my other guitars. it worth 0.1 dollars for all of them. if you think it isn’t worth for your expensive guitar, you can get the higher quality. but for me, 0.1 dollars works fine on my guitar.

0.001 uF capacitor and 150k resistor

so, how this 0.1 dollar stuff works? first, connect those in parallel. surely i prepared my solder and soldering iron for this. and here is the result:

parallel-connected capacitor and resistor

then open the back cover of the guitar, find the volume pot, solder the legs to volume pot. i can’t get better picture of this, but the diagram below will explain where to put the legs.

soldered capacitor and resistor to volume pot

i put these components to my Gretsch G5236 electromatic pro jet 125th anniversary, and it was as expected. no more mumbling tones when i lowered the volume knob.

actually it’s like adding some value to the volume pot, i made a video recorded my activity in installing this component, i found it also reduces humming when the volume pot is in half-full position which is great. i recommend you to do this on your guitar. it’s just cheap and works perfect.

August 14, 2014