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Permalink Reply by The Phrygian Kid on February 20, 2014 at 6:59pm

The shared ground may be backdooring your switch if you have the volume of either pup on less than ten. You should pop a ten cent diode across the earthing on each volume control to ensure no hot signal is crossing behind the switch, or lift the grounds off the volume pots, using them as variable resistors rather than voltage dividers.

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Permalink Reply by ChickenboneJohn on February 20, 2014 at 9:57pm

What sort of switch are you using? Les Paul type toggle or Tele style?  There are so many variations on the Tele style (different number of tags) that they sometimes drive me nuts, and I often have problems with getting them to work correctly..I usually end up putting a multimeter across the tags and trying to be a bit methodical about it..but they can be frustrating, especially with the "budget" versions of these switches.

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Permalink Reply by Cause the Blue rat on February 21, 2014 at 12:54am

Thanks for the replies!

Chickenbone, Know what you mean. I had a hard time finding a replacement for the five way I melted. Looked at quite a few of them. Seems like almost every manufacturer has their own take on how it should work. Using a Les Paul switch.

Phrygian, Volumes are acting independently.. When on the bridge the volume it's soldered to works. Not effected by the neck volume. When on both or neck Is when i have shared pots. Take out the tone pot on the diagram below and you have how my guitar is wired.

http://www.seymourduncan.com/support/wiring-diagrams/schematics.php...

Switch is new and works fine by itself. Pots are new.

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Permalink Reply by The Phrygian Kid on February 21, 2014 at 9:32am

Uhuh... See how there is an unused tab on each pot which is bent over and soldered to the chassis? These are the culprits. Any hot signal which is shunted off to ground by virtue of turning the volume control to less than ten is able to loop around to the other pot, you've unwittingly created a back boor in form of a ground loop. This is quite common where you put individual volume controls before a switch, it's how Les Paul's work too, which introduces some idiosyncrasies to their circuit. Try lifting those two tabs and leaving em unused (this is treating the pot as a variable resistor rather than a voltage divider as I put above). Good luck

Alternatively, if you still really want to ground these tabs, you can put a diode across em, these are a very very cheap component, it pays to always have a little Baggie of em. A diode will only allow current to travel thru in one direction (test with multimeter) so you'll be able to restrict this earthing of the third tab to working how you intended.

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Permalink Reply by Cause the Blue rat on February 21, 2014 at 7:07pm

Thanks for the help! This will have to wait till after this weekend. Going to our first get together in St Louis tomorrow morning. It's playable now so as is is how it will be. I did try to take the pick guard off today after work. I've managed to create a lip under the block of wood the bridge is sitting on. I've also got the pick guard under a lip at the end of the neck. As is there's no getting it off. I'll chisel away the part under the bridge.

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Permalink Reply by Cause the Blue rat on February 23, 2014 at 5:24pm

Alright Got this thing fixed! First I rechecked everything. Making sure I didn't have spare wires poking around in the really tight space I made for the pots and such. The first thing I tried was switching the neck pickup wires. That worked! Never used Pbass pickups before, Turning both pickups so there is a top and bottom wire on the same side. I wired them both top as hot. Apparently the one I chose for the neck position's hot is the bottom wire. Now I get some great sounds switching between these cheapo bass pickups.

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