How To Wire Your Electric Guitar Up
We have been speaking to an Electrical Engineer who worked for 30 at Motorola and he gave us his technical electrical background knowledge on how he wires up and electric guitar.
He said ‘You see I’ve twisted each pickup wires. This is to break up the antenna affect. Back in the old days an antenna was a straight stick.
Even though the pickups are wrapped around a bobbin electrically Radio frequencies see it as a straight line. To break up the antenna affect you twist the wires. Twisted Pair are always found in high end audio equipment. The next connection I like to point out is the back of the selector switch.
I have connected the ground side of each pickup to keep it as close to the positive side of each pickup. This addresses any crosstalk issue.
With a typical Fender either they use the metal plate with lock washers to connect ground together or the connect the ground side of the pickups to the volume control without a hard wire to the switch. Over time as the nut that hold the pot loosen up due to use.
Crosstalk of this kind is the second biggest source of noise in a guitar. The first biggest source of noise is the way a jack is manufactured. The threaded barrel of the jack loosens to the ground tab. I solder the barrel to the tab. I swap one of the A250Kohm tone control for a A250Kohm push-push control so that I can connect the neck pickup to the output of the switch, giving me the ability when the selector is in the bridge position 5 to have both on.
When the selector switch is in position 4 middle-bridge I can have all 3 pickups on at the same time. A little harder to see is that I have no tone control on the middle pickup removing the redundancy of having a tone control on 2 pickups and leaving the middle pickup for the best clean sound.
Now you might also notice I do not use a capacitor with a rated voltage value greater than 1 volt. The most any guitar pickup output voltage is 1 volt and is found only on active pickup. I not going down that rabbit trail of being able to hear the difference between a voltage rated cap of 400 volts and 1 volt, I never had and at 69 years of age probably never will. I share my method of wiring a strat which has been very successful for me for over 50 years in the hope that some will try and copy what I have done’.