How to Wire a Blend Pot?

If you're looking for some new, unique tones with your old two-pickup guitar, this mod project will be helpful. In this article I will show you how to wire a pickup blend potentiometer together with a classic 'volume+tone' stack. It is a guitar wiring system without common pickup selector. The blend pot will take its function, in quite original way.

Diagram:

Telecaster Direct-Through Mod

A direct-through mod is a very useful tone shaping tool. It will help you make your Telecaster tone brighter and more dynamic when you will need that. It's based on a DPDT switch (push-pull), used to connect pickups directly to the output, by omitting pots.

Diagram:

Gretsch-Style Guitar Wiring

Here is some new wiring diagram, based on well known Gretsch guitar circuit. I didn't add anything new into it. I just adapted the Gretsch's wiring to make it easier for those of you, who would like to mount it in some Les Paul, SG, or Telecaster Deluxe body.

This kind of circuit is used in guitars like White Falcon, Country Club or Nashville.

Diagram:

Fender Jazzmaster Wiring Mod

Fender Jazzmaster is a very versatile kind of an electric guitar. Four pots and two switches are giving a lot of tone configurations. It's also something interesting for me, as someone who like to get his own way of signal control.

I made a customized diagram of the Jazzmaster wiring. The basic difference is in the way of controlling brightness and darkness of the guitar tone. My wiring has got many options for both pickups. The original Jazzmaster circuit is offering more for the neck, than for the bridge position.

Diagram:

Warm Sounding Telecaster - Wiring Mod

Warm, smooth sounding Telecaster guitar, this is my target in this post.

I would like to show you a simple mod of a wiring, which will make your Tele more jazzy and warm. If you like to play slow muddy blues or jazz with this awesome Fender guitar, it can be interesting for you. To make this wiring, you need only two extra parts: 270k and 15k resistors.

Untypical Telecaster Wiring

This is my new wiring design for Telecaster guitar fanciers.

To make it, you need to change volume potentiometer from 250 to 500K, and put 250K push-pull pot for tone control. Also tone capacitors are not typical.

As you can see, the push-pull pot is used for selecting tone capacitors. With the 0,033uF cap, the tone circuit will work similar (little less drastically) to typical Tele. You can also use the 0,047 cap in this place. The 8,2nF cap will by useful when you will like to make the tone just only a little bit warmer, smoother.

With this wiring, your guitar will be a little brighter sounding than standard Tele, so tone control with selected the 8,2nF cap will be also useful to reach more "vintage" sound.

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Gentle Tone Control - Another Guitar Wiring Schematic

This is the cool guitar wiring if you like to warming your guitar tone by a gentle turns of the tone potentiometer's knob. For my taste, it works the best on bright or medium-bright pickups (not very hot humbuckers)