Separate volume controls, modern vs vintage wiring

[hoosier1981]

Guitar: Eastman Ar372ce laminate hollow 175 shape.
Currently have a bare knuckles mule neck, and golden age parson Street bridge. I'm going to match the pairs due to extreme volume differences and might change the wiring.

For a jazz box only, are there any tonal disadvantages with:
1. Modern wiring (vs 50s) - I prefer to use tone knob for tone, and vol for vol.
2. Separate volume controls in middle position so they don't affect each other. I wanted them to not interact but saw a thread on gearpage mentioning tone suck.
3. Treble bleed to help with volume knob not turning tone down.

Will try to sort this out before deciding between
1. Bare knuckle manhattan hsp90 WITH electo Harmonix hum debugger pedal for my insane EMI
2. Golden Age (Stew Mac) Parson Street vintage style PAF.
I can find no clean clips of this pickup but am hoping it might come close to the non-muddiness of the p90 without the hum. The p90 picks up a lot of emi once a compressor is active.

I'm half tempted to ask a tech to install a gfs quick connect wire so I can temporarily solder the other side to pickups or use a mini screw clamp...not sure how else to a/b test pickups without constant rewiring

[Cunamara]

With 50s wiring, turning down the volume does not roll off as much high end frequencies but rolling down the tone knob tends to roll down the volume. So you switch the problem.

There is a 60s wiring schematic out there, I think on premierguitar.com, that I've never tried but they described as being sort of partway between the two electrically as well as chronologically.

[rpjazzguitar]

For years, I played two pickup solid bodies and I rewired them as follows.

Master volume, Master tone.

The other two knobs were individual volume for each pickup. That way, I could blend the two pickups if I wanted to, but I never wanted to. I left them full up at all times and could easily have bypassed them entirely.

At the time, I did it to keep things simple on stage. I was using a volume pedal, and FX box and Mesa Boogie Mark III. There were so many volume pots in my signal chain that it was easy to lose track. I could probably have done well with one working knob on the guitar -- a tone control.

Even now, with a Comins GCS-1 the only control on the guitar I'm likely to touch is the neck pickup tone control. If I felt confident I could rewire it without soldering the finish by accident, I would.

[Little Jay]

First of all: in theory there should be no tonal difference between the different wirings! There’s only a difference in behaviour when you roll off volume and tone.

I have been experimenting quite a lot with the different wirings on my builts lately....

Since my ES-125 has the 50ies wiring and I like it a lot in that guitar, my idea was to wire my 2 pu/4 control guitars also that way.... did not work! The controls did not react the same! The volume jumped up very fast in the first 20% of the turn, inspite of being the same type (500K log/audio). My best guess is that’s because the modern log pots do not have the same taper as the old log pots in the 1947 wiring harness of my ES-125 and a single PU lay out reacts differently from the double PU/four pots layout.

After some experimenting, the sixties wiring with a treble bleed with 100k/.001uf parallel across the volume pot worked best for me in my double PU/4 control guitars: smooth in-or decrease of the volume acoss the entire taper and a ‘fixed’ amount of highs at every position of the volume pot, set by the treble pot.

(Btw, I chose the 60 wiring only for practical reasons, since the ground lugs on my pots were wired for 50ies and it was less work to change - 60ies should react the same as modern.)

Here’s the article on premier guitar:
(I think it overrates the benefits of 50ies wiring...)

Mod Garage: Three Ways to Wire a Tone Pot - Premier Guitar

[sgosnell]

I prefer the Benedetto wiring, which is similar to the modern scheme, except that the connection between the volume and tone is a straight wire, and the capacitor goes between the case of the tone control and the bottom lug, instead of being a straight ground. Moving the cap seems to be a better solution to my ears. Tone changes very little, if any, as the volume control is changed. There are multiple ways of wiring a guitar, and the best is a matter of personal preference.