Three years later. Great advice man. Don't overthink it man, follow the wiring diagrams and make sure soldering is good. (Take practice, but once you've wired one you're itching to do the next one) 🤘🤘
Thanks, Dylan! You nailed it for me at the 9:02 mark. I own a number of Teles but was working on a thinline build which, of course uses a pickguard and not a control plate. I had no idea! I consistently appreciate your separation of the science from the subjective! Nobody can break the laws of nature, like the law of gravity. . .
Thanks Dylan! Changed over some pups on a HH T-style guitar and couldn't work out what the buzz was. Originally I had a tele control plate on the guitar and then I removed it when adding the new pups. So the grounding was removed by not using the plate. Adding in the vol to tone pot grounding wire did the trick! Many thanks :))
I know this is an old video.... but man do I appreciate you so much.... I always had my multimeter on the wrong setting... after wiring up my bc rich warlock (two 2 wire humbuckers. One volume. One tone. Three way switch. Output jack.... all of the sudden playing my bridge pickup went out due to the switch moving around so much.... before that I was literally feeling shocks cause I didn't have everything grounded... ty so much dylan... you are such an awesome human being
I have a set of pickups with voicing and coil splitting switched by push-pull (similar to Fishman Fluence), so there is a number of wires. What I found convenient is to have a shield, so I can avoid soldering every component to the ground and make a web of wires. Shielding did not seem to reduce noise significantly, though.
Never mind - you answered it later in the video - great resource - thanks. BUt here is a question I have not seen in videos yet - how to FIND a buzz coming from your house or venue.
if its notchy or there is a gap, wow, ok, yep this is the greatest tip ever, and then I can check before reassembling and then have to take it apart again, thankyou very much,
Hey there good sir. You've been my constant companion for the last week trying to figure out how to put an import switch into a brand new Ibanez that had a circuit board switch from the factory.. it's an RG 421 EX. I learned never to trust a cheap guitar strap ever again. A weekend to owning the guitar it dropped on the ground chip the headstock a little bit not too bad but actually bent the 5-way selector switch knob on the front of the of guitar. Hence the drama ensued. I installed the 5-way Fender style in another RG 421 years ago and figured no big deal. I was sorely mistaken. I've never seen a guitar wire like the new rg421 that I just bought. Biggest thing I learned is there is no industry standard for anything to do with guitar electronics. Which really is frustrating and Googling it doesn't do anything. There's so much misinformation. I found your channel when I was trying to figure out which wires to tie together because on the new RG the hot lead was white and that could mean anything. Your videos taught me how to find out which coil is on the pickups etc etc. anyways I finally figured out what was going on with that import switch. It seems to me the B side what would be a fender switch runs backwards to the common in the middle. I have my multimeter fired up and ready to go as I work my way through these videos. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge and providing great content.
Can we get a video of how to diagnose a newly built guitar that has never worked? Ive got a les paul kit build that i tried to put in a jimmy page wiring harness. I get no sound from the strings and it has a consistent buzz/hum that goes away when i touch the strings/jack/bridge etc but still no sound from the strings. Im not sure where to start trying to troubleshoot.
I really enjoy your channel and find it very useful. I think I have a scenario that falls outside of the issues described in this video. I know you can't cover everything, but I thought I would share this one as I think it may be a fairly common issue. I have a 3-way switch bridge/both/neck. Neck stopped working, middle has super low output and bridge is fine. I checked with a meter (following your video) and determined jacks, pickup, pots, switch are all good. I think I might have a dead ground in the bridge pickup wiring. It is bleeding off all of the signal from the neck pickup and most of the signal from the combined pickups. Does this make any sense? Both pickups are Lace Led Sensor Duallys connected to micro toggles, so there are a lot of wires in the cavity. Thanks for all the great informative videos.
I’m building a partscaster. 1) I shielded my cavity. OOPS. 2) My signal comes out sounding clean when routed off the pickups, clean off the 5-way switch, and is corrupted in the volume pot. Wild hairy tone in the middle like a pre-teen in Hot Topic for the first time. Volume pot has been replaced already, I’m running a strat build with three humbuckers and a DPDT switch to “add bridge” to vol output on the wiring diagram when pulled. It feels like a grounding issue but it persists even after I added grounds connecting backs of the 3 pots. Might you know what contributes to hairy emo volume pots in this configuration? Love the videos, the multi-meter is in the mail! Cheers!
After hearing you talk about shielding issues, I'm wondering now if using the copper tape in the control cavity; in addition to, around my pickups if this is causing my custom P-Bass controls to function only as tones not as separate vol and tone. All of my grounds and wiring seem to be identical the the Precision control/pickup/output jack diagram.
just started watching your channel. Building my first guitar just watching youtube. My question is this. i got buzz/hum from stacked single coil pickups. I don't have a neck yet and I have the whole thing wired up. All the stuff is prewired and the output jack is all set. Some tell me the hum will go away once I put strings on it and it does go away if i touch any of the metal, trem cover bridge etc. Do I still have a grounding issue? If not explain why please. I am new to this. I don't have a meter. When I get the neck I can test whether the hum goes away but if it does I am trying to understand why and if it doesnt I want to fix it. Let me know like your videos desmystifies some stuff. Demystify this one and I will buy your a beer. Thanks.
Dylan, my pickup reads 0 measuring it directly. It just simply stooped working. Is it possible to fix it? That problem started after I worked on the shield of my strat to wire the tone control to the bridge pickup. When I put everything back together, I noticed the neck pickup wouldn’t work. So, opened it up again and the neck pickup reads 0 directly, so I know it’s not the switch. I thought it would be the switch, because I pulled the shield and wiring pretty hard unadvertently. But, apparently, it is not. I live in Brazil, so there’s no way for me to send it to you for an inspection. Do you know what the problem in the pickup might be? Thank you. You’re the only guitar tech I trust. Cheers, my friend.
I'm about to pull out my hair. Bought a new multimeter, followed yours (and others) instructions to check pots but all I get are random numbers. Ok, so I move on and set the meter to continuity. This function works. I place probes on center lug of neck volume and ground, beep, we have continuity! Do the same on bridge volume, nothing. Everything seems fine on wiring from output jack to switch. I go to tone pot, (btw this is a 2-vol./1-tone schematic for HB's) output to #1(hot) outside beeps, cap in center position does not beep but grounded end of cap does. Open outside lug and cap end in center beeps. Any advice would be appreciated.
Nice intel! I ve been absorbing your knowledge through your videos these past few days; thanks a lot for making them! I would like to know your opinions on what makes a good five string bass (low B) regarding scale length and if you have any bad or good experience with headless instruments, especially basses, and stainless steel frets Cheers from France, Baptiste.
Something that got me a few years ago. I had no output. Opened everything up and found no broken wires. Eventually realized my problem was my ACTIVE pickups ( which I never had prior) and leaving the cable plugged in causes the battery to go dead.
Hey Dylan, I have not received any notifications from your channel for well over a month. I subscribe to a lot of guitar channels so sometimes it takes me awhile to notice if someone is missing lol. I checked to make sure I was till subscribed and the bell was hit and yes on both, lately I have found that I have been unsubscribed from several channels without my doing it. You may want to check it out if you have noticed a drop in viewership? Can I get your thoughts on an issue I am having with a Les Paul? It's a 2014 and I bought the PCB and pups off of Reverb from another 2014, the pups are push/pull on the volumes. My issue is that no matter what type of setting it's on, clean dirty etc, I have to turn the guitar almost all the way up in order to get the full effects of the setting I am on. Usually it has to be on about 8. Someone told me this was a common issue with the PCB guitars. What do you recommend I check before I end up pulling the PCB and just hand wiring the whole thing?
I want to make a custom guitar for myself and I want a specific complicated pickup configuration but I really don’t know how to wire pickups. Can I email you what I want and can I buy it from you with instructions on how to wire it? I’m not even sure I can afford this but I figure buying a couple pickups and building my own is way cheaper and probably in my budget compared to buying a manufactured guitar with the same specs
One of my guitars has very low output volume and it is not because of cable, pickups or pots. Do you know what might cause the problem? For example if I use distortion pedal it sounds like low gain overdrive pedal. Something takes away power.
I had taken my hand made guitar to a music store to sell on consignment. They checked the volume output and found it low when it was on 10 (max). It is a simple curcuit with a 500k volume and a 250 tone pot. I wired it from a StewMac kit for a SG jr. Any ideas from anybody. Thanks, Bob
Hi, I have bought a pre-wired tele control from you website on the 6th of September, but the tracking havent updated since 12th of September, I couldn't contact USPS since they dunt answer email for package which sending outside U.S., so I sent a email via the contact link in your website but didnt get any reply, and I tried to inbox you through facebook but didnt get any reply either.
Hello Dylan! Thank you for your very informative videos! I have a question concerning the effect of wire gauge on the effective output of the pickup, which is kind of a thought experiment: Say we have a humbucker pickup, which is machine wound with AWG 42 to say 8,00 kOhms with relatively full bobbins. Now we (in thought) stretch the AWG 42 wire from that pickup to AWG 43 and rewind the same pickup with the same wire, using machine winds. The resistance of the pickups might end up being around 13,50 kOhm that way (give or take, it does not really matter that much here). The mass of wire on the pickup will be exacly the same either way. It's clear that we will end up with considerably more winds on the bobbins, resulting in a diminished treble response. But in which way will his have an effect on the overall output of the pickup, when everything else stays the same? Will it be effectively be the same output, as there is the same amount (mass) of wire on the bobbins? Will it be more, as there are more winds on the bobbins? Or will it be less? What else will effectively change when every other factor stays the same?
You know whats a trip? Anyone in my scenario thats trying to figure out whats wrong with yheir guitar by watching these videos will quickly get pissed. Theres so mant things these guys dont do right. They will test things and if they are operable, they move on to the next test OR they spend a lot of time teaching us electronics fundamentals, or theyre skipping around and they also seem to forget most of us are total noobs. I installed a new bridge humbucker. Im getting sound, but its low across both pickups. I bought a multimeter and I swear, it is impossible to find a video where the guy is just saying...ok, to test the volume pot touch this here and this there and if its good itll say this, if bad itll do that! etc etc. Not one. Its unbelievable
@@DylanTalksTone Broham, lets turn this into a teachable moment for you. First of all most dont teach right. People think if they know a lot about something then theyre good to to teach. This video here? Teaches way too much about fundamentals of electronics. I get that you want us to understand why this does this and that does that but were all here to be shown, one by one, where to place the meter leads, what it looks like if its good and bad. The other video where you had us start with plugging in cord and testing that way? I did that with you. Very first thing was the bridge PU. Turn the knobs all the way up, selector on bridge and attach the testers. Yours tested good and you moved on. Mine showed open. Lol. For everything you test bro you have to give both scenarios. It wasn't a bad PU. Not sure what it was but I disconnected neck PU and it works now. But hey, sorry I took it out on you I want through 6 videos and it was frustrating trying to just find what was promised.
@@bellmeisterful anybody that starts a comment w "broham" and making a "teachable moment" ...... no. you can scroll on. Condescending doesn't look good on you. I hope you find what you are looking for
@@DylanTalksTone Everyones so sensitive in these PC Cancel, Culture Days. Whats wrong with Broham? What about Broseph or Bruv? Its just a silly different way of saying bro or brother which to me is friendly. Well I burned up a couple pots and maybe a switch lately my first time soldering. But I have learned a ton thanks to guys like you. Its just a pain getting through all the bs for the simple answers
Watched your first multimeter expo and now the second. I commented your hands were in the way in the first. They were again in the way in this video Please set your close-up camera to the other side. It's very frustrating to hear the word "here" and "here" and not see what you're referring to. The Information is always good and I appreciate your expertise but I nearly quit watching as soon as you did the blocking hands thing again.
Three years later.
Great advice man.
Don't overthink it man, follow the wiring diagrams and make sure soldering is good. (Take practice, but once you've wired one you're itching to do the next one)
🤘🤘
Thanks, Dylan! You nailed it for me at the 9:02 mark. I own a number of Teles but was working on a thinline build which, of course uses a pickguard and not a control plate. I had no idea!
I consistently appreciate your separation of the science from the subjective! Nobody can break the laws of nature, like the law of gravity. . .
Thanks Dylan! Changed over some pups on a HH T-style guitar and couldn't work out what the buzz was. Originally I had a tele control plate on the guitar and then I removed it when adding the new pups. So the grounding was removed by not using the plate. Adding in the vol to tone pot grounding wire did the trick! Many thanks :))
Thank you so very much for keeping it simple, even though I have a meter, it makes more sense to me in the simple teaching method.
I know this is an old video.... but man do I appreciate you so much.... I always had my multimeter on the wrong setting... after wiring up my bc rich warlock (two 2 wire humbuckers. One volume. One tone. Three way switch. Output jack.... all of the sudden playing my bridge pickup went out due to the switch moving around so much.... before that I was literally feeling shocks cause I didn't have everything grounded... ty so much dylan... you are such an awesome human being
Hey we meet in a music go round a couple of weeks ago i was playing the fender stratacaster and u taught me some stuff about guitars thanks so much.
I have a set of pickups with voicing and coil splitting switched by push-pull (similar to Fishman Fluence), so there is a number of wires. What I found convenient is to have a shield, so I can avoid soldering every component to the ground and make a web of wires. Shielding did not seem to reduce noise significantly, though.
Never mind - you answered it later in the video - great resource - thanks. BUt here is a question I have not seen in videos yet - how to FIND a buzz coming from your house or venue.
if its notchy or there is a gap, wow, ok, yep
this is the greatest tip ever, and then I can check before reassembling and then have to take it apart again,
thankyou very much,
Hey there good sir. You've been my constant companion for the last week trying to figure out how to put an import switch into a brand new Ibanez that had a circuit board switch from the factory.. it's an RG 421 EX. I learned never to trust a cheap guitar strap ever again. A weekend to owning the guitar it dropped on the ground chip the headstock a little bit not too bad but actually bent the 5-way selector switch knob on the front of the of guitar. Hence the drama ensued. I installed the 5-way Fender style in another RG 421 years ago and figured no big deal. I was sorely mistaken. I've never seen a guitar wire like the new rg421 that I just bought. Biggest thing I learned is there is no industry standard for anything to do with guitar electronics. Which really is frustrating and Googling it doesn't do anything. There's so much misinformation. I found your channel when I was trying to figure out which wires to tie together because on the new RG the hot lead was white and that could mean anything. Your videos taught me how to find out which coil is on the pickups etc etc. anyways I finally figured out what was going on with that import switch. It seems to me the B side what would be a fender switch runs backwards to the common in the middle. I have my multimeter fired up and ready to go as I work my way through these videos. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge and providing great content.
This helps much, thanks,, now on the troubleshooting.
Can we get a video of how to diagnose a newly built guitar that has never worked? Ive got a les paul kit build that i tried to put in a jimmy page wiring harness. I get no sound from the strings and it has a consistent buzz/hum that goes away when i touch the strings/jack/bridge etc but still no sound from the strings. Im not sure where to start trying to troubleshoot.
Thanks for the information in your vedios!
Michael
😎
I really enjoy your channel and find it very useful. I think I have a scenario that falls outside of the issues described in this video. I know you can't cover everything, but I thought I would share this one as I think it may be a fairly common issue. I have a 3-way switch bridge/both/neck. Neck stopped working, middle has super low output and bridge is fine. I checked with a meter (following your video) and determined jacks, pickup, pots, switch are all good. I think I might have a dead ground in the bridge pickup wiring. It is bleeding off all of the signal from the neck pickup and most of the signal from the combined pickups. Does this make any sense? Both pickups are Lace Led Sensor Duallys connected to micro toggles, so there are a lot of wires in the cavity. Thanks for all the great informative videos.
I’m building a partscaster.
1) I shielded my cavity. OOPS.
2) My signal comes out sounding clean when routed off the pickups, clean off the 5-way switch, and is corrupted in the volume pot. Wild hairy tone in the middle like a pre-teen in Hot Topic for the first time. Volume pot has been replaced already, I’m running a strat build with three humbuckers and a DPDT switch to “add bridge” to vol output on the wiring diagram when pulled. It feels like a grounding issue but it persists even after I added grounds connecting backs of the 3 pots. Might you know what contributes to hairy emo volume pots in this configuration?
Love the videos, the multi-meter is in the mail! Cheers!
After hearing you talk about shielding issues, I'm wondering now if using the copper tape in the control cavity; in addition to, around my pickups if this is causing my custom P-Bass controls to function only as tones not as separate vol and tone. All of my grounds and wiring seem to be identical the the Precision control/pickup/output jack diagram.
just started watching your channel. Building my first guitar just watching youtube. My question is this. i got buzz/hum from stacked single coil pickups. I don't have a neck yet and I have the whole thing wired up. All the stuff is prewired and the output jack is all set. Some tell me the hum will go away once I put strings on it and it does go away if i touch any of the metal, trem cover bridge etc. Do I still have a grounding issue? If not explain why please. I am new to this. I don't have a meter. When I get the neck I can test whether the hum goes away but if it does I am trying to understand why and if it doesnt I want to fix it. Let me know like your videos desmystifies some stuff. Demystify this one and I will buy your a beer. Thanks.
What if you check the pickup at the wires coming into / out of the pickup? I get a zero reading when I test my single coil pickups in this manner.
Dylan, my pickup reads 0 measuring it directly. It just simply stooped working. Is it possible to fix it? That problem started after I worked on the shield of my strat to wire the tone control to the bridge pickup. When I put everything back together, I noticed the neck pickup wouldn’t work. So, opened it up again and the neck pickup reads 0 directly, so I know it’s not the switch. I thought it would be the switch, because I pulled the shield and wiring pretty hard unadvertently. But, apparently, it is not. I live in Brazil, so there’s no way for me to send it to you for an inspection. Do you know what the problem in the pickup might be? Thank you. You’re the only guitar tech I trust. Cheers, my friend.
I'm about to pull out my hair. Bought a new multimeter, followed yours (and others) instructions to check pots but all I get are random numbers. Ok, so I move on and set the meter to continuity. This function works. I place probes on center lug of neck volume and ground, beep, we have continuity! Do the same on bridge volume, nothing. Everything seems fine on wiring from output jack to switch. I go to tone pot, (btw this is a 2-vol./1-tone schematic for HB's) output to #1(hot) outside beeps, cap in center position does not beep but grounded end of cap does. Open outside lug and cap end in center beeps. Any advice would be appreciated.
Nice intel! I ve been absorbing your knowledge through your videos these past few days; thanks a lot for making them!
I would like to know your opinions on what makes a good five string bass (low B) regarding scale length and if you have any bad or good experience with headless instruments, especially basses, and stainless steel frets
Cheers from France,
Baptiste.
Something that got me a few years ago. I had no output. Opened everything up and found no broken wires. Eventually realized my problem was my ACTIVE pickups ( which I never had prior) and leaving the cable plugged in causes the battery to go dead.
I have an analog meter, it doesn’t have a selection for continuity. Is there a way to check or is that just too useful / I made a dumb purchase lol.
Nice one Dylan
Hey Dylan, I have not received any notifications from your channel for well over a month. I subscribe to a lot of guitar channels so sometimes it takes me awhile to notice if someone is missing lol. I checked to make sure I was till subscribed and the bell was hit and yes on both, lately I have found that I have been unsubscribed from several channels without my doing it. You may want to check it out if you have noticed a drop in viewership?
Can I get your thoughts on an issue I am having with a Les Paul? It's a 2014 and I bought the PCB and pups off of Reverb from another 2014, the pups are push/pull on the volumes. My issue is that no matter what type of setting it's on, clean dirty etc, I have to turn the guitar almost all the way up in order to get the full effects of the setting I am on. Usually it has to be on about 8. Someone told me this was a common issue with the PCB guitars. What do you recommend I check before I end up pulling the PCB and just hand wiring the whole thing?
I have bypassed my bridge volume pot it does nothing for some reason its weirs but its on full just cant turn bridge vol down . Any tips?
I want to make a custom guitar for myself and I want a specific complicated pickup configuration but I really don’t know how to wire pickups. Can I email you what I want and can I buy it from you with instructions on how to wire it? I’m not even sure I can afford this but I figure buying a couple pickups and building my own is way cheaper and probably in my budget compared to buying a manufactured guitar with the same specs
Before replacing components, also check for bad solder joints.
One of my guitars has very low output volume and it is not because of cable, pickups or pots. Do you know what might cause the problem? For example if I use distortion pedal it sounds like low gain overdrive pedal. Something takes away power.
Where's the link to the video about guitar shielding?
I had taken my hand made guitar to a music store to sell on consignment. They checked the volume output and found it low when it was on 10 (max). It is a simple curcuit with a 500k volume and a 250 tone pot. I wired it from a StewMac kit for a SG jr. Any ideas from anybody. Thanks, Bob
Hi, I have bought a pre-wired tele control from you website on the 6th of September, but the tracking havent updated since 12th of September, I couldn't contact USPS since they dunt answer email for package which sending outside U.S., so I sent a email via the contact link in your website but didnt get any reply, and I tried to inbox you through facebook but didnt get any reply either.
Thanks so much for reaching out. I will look into this!
@@DylanTalksTone that will be great? thank you!!
Hello Dylan!
Thank you for your very informative videos!
I have a question concerning the effect of wire gauge on the effective output of the pickup, which is kind of a thought experiment:
Say we have a humbucker pickup, which is machine wound with AWG 42 to say 8,00 kOhms with relatively full bobbins. Now we (in thought) stretch the AWG 42 wire from that pickup to AWG 43 and rewind the same pickup with the same wire, using machine winds. The resistance of the pickups might end up being around 13,50 kOhm that way (give or take, it does not really matter that much here).
The mass of wire on the pickup will be exacly the same either way. It's clear that we will end up with considerably more winds on the bobbins, resulting in a diminished treble response.
But in which way will his have an effect on the overall output of the pickup, when everything else stays the same? Will it be effectively be the same output, as there is the same amount (mass) of wire on the bobbins? Will it be more, as there are more winds on the bobbins? Or will it be less? What else will effectively change when every other factor stays the same?
Dylan..your channels very good education 💓👍
You know whats a trip?
Anyone in my scenario thats trying to figure out whats wrong with yheir guitar by watching these videos will quickly get pissed.
Theres so mant things these guys dont do right.
They will test things and if they are operable, they move on to the next test OR they spend a lot of time teaching us electronics fundamentals, or theyre skipping around and they also seem to forget most of us are total noobs.
I installed a new bridge humbucker. Im getting sound, but its low across both pickups. I bought a multimeter and I swear, it is impossible to find a video where the guy is just saying...ok, to test the volume pot touch this here and this there and if its good itll say this, if bad itll do that! etc etc. Not one. Its unbelievable
Sounds like you need a drink... or a Valium. Also... we did that video. Right around the same time as this one.
@@DylanTalksTone Broham, lets turn this into a teachable moment for you.
First of all most dont teach right. People think if they know a lot about something then theyre good to to teach.
This video here? Teaches way too much about fundamentals of electronics. I get that you want us to understand why this does this and that does that but were all here to be shown, one by one, where to place the meter leads, what it looks like if its good and bad.
The other video where you had us start with plugging in cord and testing that way? I did that with you. Very first thing was the bridge PU. Turn the knobs all the way up, selector on bridge and attach the testers. Yours tested good and you moved on.
Mine showed open. Lol.
For everything you test bro you have to give both scenarios. It wasn't a bad PU. Not sure what it was but I disconnected neck PU and it works now.
But hey, sorry I took it out on you I want through 6 videos and it was frustrating trying to just find what was promised.
@@bellmeisterful anybody that starts a comment w "broham" and making a "teachable moment" ...... no. you can scroll on. Condescending doesn't look good on you. I hope you find what you are looking for
@@DylanTalksTone Everyones so sensitive in these PC Cancel, Culture Days. Whats wrong with Broham? What about Broseph or Bruv? Its just a silly different way of saying bro or brother which to me is friendly.
Well I burned up a couple pots and maybe a switch lately my first time soldering. But I have learned a ton thanks to guys like you. Its just a pain getting through all the bs for the simple answers
Cancel culture is stupid.... but common respect and courtesy is not. Have a great evening.
Watched your first multimeter expo and now the second. I commented your hands were in the way in the first. They were again in the way in this video Please set your close-up camera to the other side. It's very frustrating to hear the word "here" and "here" and not see what you're referring to. The Information is always good and I appreciate your expertise but I nearly quit watching as soon as you did the blocking hands thing again.