Megalottacombo - Electric Guitar Wiring

2013-11-13

This section is about the electronics and wiring of the guitar. Megalottacombo is just a name I made up for the wiring scheme. There is a good bit of information about the wiring, so I split it across several pages.

Let me say up at the top that I am not an expert in guitar wiring, so don’t take any of this as the final word. I have a “let’s see if this works” attitude towards it. I may have some mistakes or bad decisions here and there.

Two Humbuckers

The donor guitar originally had one humbucker pickup. When I first started the project, I decided to add a second humbucker. I think my 1996 logic was something smart like, “two is better than one because it is more”.

Fast forward many years, and this project is still going have two humbuckers because the body is carved that way. But now I’m also considering how many different ways these can be connected, especially if you consider using each coil separately.

Many Sound Possibilities

On the internet you can find lots of talk of the different sound possibilities you can achieve when treating a humbucker as two separate pickups. You can connect them in series for a loud sound. Connect them in parallel for a quieter, brighter sound. Connect them out of phase for a weird, thin sound. And connect just one of the coils for a pure sound.

All of the different ways of connecting the two coils of a humbucker also apply to connecting two humbuckers to each other. Here you can do interesting things, like create a “wide wingspan” humbucker by turning on just the north coil of the neck pickup and the south coil of the bridge pickup.

My goal became to fit as many of these interesting connection ideas into the guitar as possible. I tried a lot of different ideas for achieving all of the connections in a clean and neat way. The result is Megalottacombo wiring.

Narrowing Down The Possibilities Into Something Final

Figuring out the wiring became its own project within a project, and I have broken the information across several pages.