GUITAR WIRING

Posted on June 19, 2012 by Richard Irons

For many
players, a change of pickups is one of the very first steps into
modding guitars. Its reversible, its not too hard, and it has an
immediate impact on your tone. However, its still possible to get
yourself into a bit of a mess if you dont have a basic
understanding of why youre doing what youre doing. This is the
first in a short series of blog posts that will take you from the very
basics, up to where you will probably feel confident enough not
only to follow the schematics you find on the internet (such as
those found here), but to design and implement your own wiring
schemes.
The Golden Rule
What a guitar amp actually does is amplify the changing voltage
between two contacts enough that it can physically move a
speaker. This is what turns the electricity into sound. The two
contacts in question are the tip and ring of the jack cable you plug
into the input on your amp. We usually call these two contacts
hot and ground. The most basic piece of knowledge you can
have about guitar wiring is this:
If the voltage difference between hot and ground is a constant
zero, silence is the result.
Note that this is different to when you plug a cable into your amp,
but dont plug the other end into a guitar (yes, weve all done it,

even though our amp manual tells us not to). Then, you get noise.
So if you plug into your guitar and you get absolute silence, you
know youve probably got a short circuit.
Wiring a pickup
So now we want to make some noise. This isnt an article on how
pickups work, so for our purposes we will just acknowledge that the
strings disturb the pickups magnetic field, which is then read by
the coiled wire. This creates a series of voltage differences
between the start and end of that wire, which correspond to the
movements of the string, and thus the sound. To start with well
use single-coil pickups as theyre more basic. All we have to do is
get that voltage difference (from here on in, well call that voltage
difference over time the signal) into the amp. This is a piece of
cake. As you can see in this diagram, we simply attach the two
wires from the pickup to the two contacts on the jack. Its a
convention that the black wire goes to the ground contact, and the
white one to the hot contact. For this setup, that convention
doesnt matter much. But later in the series well see why it is
useful and

necessary.
Having
wired this up, we have a playable guitar with one pickup and no
controls. For some players, that might even be enough. But I have
a feeling youre not one of those players. And neither am I. Check
in again next week and well look at kill switches, volume controls
and tone controls.
If you have any questions or comments so far then please bring
them up in the comments. I will get back to you as quickly as I can!
CUT THAT OUT!

Assuming we dont want to stop there, the simplest next step

would be to add a kill switch. This is a switch that silences the
guitar in one position and allows the signal through in the other.
You might think that we can simply add a mini-toggle switch in the
hot wire to cut the output from the pickup, like so:

However, when we use this switch to cut the signal, this scheme
would actually cause the same noise we hear when we have a
cable plugged into the amp but no guitar. Were not ensuring that
the two contacts are at equal voltage.

Instead, we need a switch that still completes the circuit, but cuts
the pickup out of the equation, like this:

With this switch, in the on position, the hot jack contact is

connected to the output of the pickup. In the off position, its
connected straight to ground (while the hot output from the pickup

isnt connected to anything at all). Now we have a kill switch that

truly silences the guitar when engaged.
TURN IT UP

A kill switch is OK, but even more useful is a volume control. A

volume control uses a potentiometer, which is the component that
lives behind the knobs on a guitar. This is what it looks like:

As you can see, there are three contacts on the pot. The outer two
are connected to either end of a resistive strip, and the middle one
is connected to a wiper that moves across the strip as the knob is
turned. By connecting our hot signal to the leftmost contact, and
the rightmost contact to ground, we can give the middle contact a
controllable choice between being connected completely to the
hot output, completely to ground, or anywhere in between. By
connecting this middle contact to the jack, as in this diagram, we
have implemented a volume control.

In this diagram you can see that Ive moved the ground connection
from the pickup to the back of the volume control, and connected
the ground connection to the same place as well as the volumes
third lug. Its standard in guitar wiring that the ground wires are
always connected to ground, for simplicitys sake and to ensure
that metal parts are grounded. Its also fairly standard that the

back of the volume pot is used as a grounding point for all wires to
be grounded. There are pros, cons and exceptions, but a discussion
of those is beyond the scope of this post.
TONE IT DOWN

The last thing were going to look at in this article is adding a tone
control. A tone control works differently to a volume control. It uses
a pot and a capacitor together to bleed the treble frequencies in
the signal to ground. This works because putting a capacitor on a
hot wire only allows treble frequencies to the other side. Once
those treble frequencies are present on both hot and ground, the
voltage difference is eliminated and the treble disappears from the
audible output.
To attach a tone control to the circuit, we connect the input to the
volume control (our hot signal from the pickup) to a second pot, at
one end of the resistive strip. Then we connect a capacitor
between the wiper contact of the pot and ground (for which well
use the pot casing). The other contact on the pot is unused,
because were using it as a variable resistor in this instance, rather
than as a voltage divider. Turning the pot down allows more signal
to reach the capacitor, where the treble frequencies then leak
through and are grounded. This is how it looks:

Thats the last thing Im going to explain in this post. We now have
a guitar circuit with one pickup, and a master volume and tone
control. Thats the exact circuit used in the prototype Fender
Esquire.