Wiring Experiments
I brought my Fireman to the Ibanez Custom Shop today for some wiring experiments. Alex, the tech who helped me, used clip-on cables (shown in the photo above) to test out the wiring before soldering the wires to the switch. This guitar has two humbuckers and one hum-cancelling single-coil, so there are a lot of wiring options for the 5-way switch, and also I wanted to try some experiments with the tone control. After trying a couple different wiring possibilities (both on my last tour, and more recently in the studio), I settled on this wiring for the switch:
1. Bridge 2. Bridge (inner coil) + Middle 3. Bridge + Neck 4.Neck (inner coil) + Middle 5. Neck
This is similar wiring to my PGM guitars, but the middle position is different. The usual middle position is the middle single coil pickup by itself. But I found that I prefer the "Bridge + Neck" humbuckers combined. It's a very Les Paul kind of sound. And I still can get nice glassy clean tones from positions 2. and 4.
The other new thing is that the Tone control is only wired to the Bridge pickup.
Why would I do that? Somehow I find that I like the sound of the Tone knob (set around 3) for the Bridge pickup, but I prefer not to use it on the Neck pickup. It allows me to switch back and forth between those sounds without having to keep readjusting the Tone knob.
The Tone knob also affects the other switch positions that use the Bridge pickup. For some reason, the Tone control sounds very "transparent" on position 2. This position uses the inner single coil of the Bridge humbucker, and it seems to lessen the effect of the Tone control. The good thing it that it sounds very good. The Tone control warms up the sound a bit, but the high end sparkle still remains on top.
In the full humbucking positions (1 and 3), the Tone control has a stronger effect, so I usually set the knob around "3."
Conclusion: It's really fun to tweak with tone... especially when there is an expert weilding the soldering iron. Thank you, Alex!