I’m a big fan of the Five Tone Tele scheme, and am one of the TDPRI forum members who will jump right in with advice and instructions when there are problems posted with the Fender 4-way mod. I have the Five Tone Tele mod in the three Teles that I own that have the “normal” control layout. I like the versitily of the scheme, and what some players may find as flaws I think are bonuses – such as, the jump in gain from the series combo. I’ve played mine that way for many years.

I’m also a BIG Gibson fan. I have three Les Pauls, an ES-333, and recently aquired a Flying V. And, yes, all of them have had many wiring mods and pup swaps, in particular my ol’ three-pup Custom – whatta workhorse during my BarWarz days, and the test mule for many of my early experiments and much of my hands-on experience with goofy wiring schemes.

A few years ago I redrew a couple of wiring schemes for a two-pup Tele (posted in the TDPRI archives) that used some series combos, but involved a cap between the pickups to change the tonal outcome. I never actually tried the schemes, as I was happy with my own Five Tone Tele scheme. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. However, I have long thought that perhaps the additon of a cap or two might tame the Five Tone Tele mod for people who found the new series combos too radical, and even benefit the Fender 4-way mod – but I just never got around to doing anything with the idea.

The motivation for finally working on this idea came with designing a new scheme for the Flying V. I have always admired Albert King’s tone, and to me it just SOUNDS like a series/out of phase combo is the shortest way to get there. That scheme works great with single-coil-pups, anyway. However, I was less than overwhelmed by the series/out of phase combo of the humbuckers on the Flying V when I tried it. Hmmm, maybe there’s something to that series-with-a-cap idea that will help...

I opened up “Black Bart,” my parts-o-caster (because it was the easiset to experiment with), and modified the Superswitch scheme I had in there, which I have done a bit of a re-thunk on. The new scheme does everything exactly the same as the old one, but is easier to wire up (IMHO) and frees up a pole that might be used to run something else – like, making the tone pot “come and go” with the different throws.

For the purposes of the experiment, rather than a hard-wired jumper the connection between the pickups for the two series throws, I instead ran leads OUT of the control cavity, so that I could try hooking up a few caps – instead of the jumper – and see what it did to the series tones. Here are my observations so far:

Inserting a cap between the pups (rather than a wire jumper) when played in series/in phase certainly WILL knock some of the fatness and gain out of the combo. I tried three common values that every hot-rodder should have in their tool box - .050uF (Fender tone cap), .020uF (Gibson tone cap) and .001uF (the common treble bleed value).

With the smallest value (.001uF), I found that the series tone was no louder than the parallel tone! Of course, at the same time, it lost most of its warmth, but it was still a distinct and different tone from the parallel combo. I thought it retained the basic character of the series idea (less harmonic content than parallel), but without all the added bass and gain of the "humbucker-sh" series tone. I call that one a success, and I’m getting a few more different values of caps to try out – I THINK that maybe something in the .010uF- .015uF will make me happy, and perhaps the .0046uF that some of you have been using to “tame” the ice-pick might be a good value to balance the series/in phase tone with the parallel tone – keeps the different "series" character, but without the big gain boost.

The same idea will work on the Fender 4-way. Here’s how: replace the jumper that crosses over between the two poles (it’s the series connection between the neck pup’s negative lead and the bridge pup’s hot) with a cap, and you can definitely tame the dreaded “volume goose” of the series combo.

On the other side of the coin, one of the schemes I drew inserted the cap at the series/out of phase connection, in an effort to make the out of phase combo LESS thin. Or, so I ASSSumed!

The observations of this experiment have been that when the series/out of phase combo was played with a cap as the series connection instead of a plain wire jumper, with ANY value cap the out of phase tone became THINNER – not fatter. So, it seems I have been labouring under a false assumption, and may have given a few bits of bad advice – hey, it happens. My observation: A cap used as the jumper in a series/out of phase combo does NOT fatten the tone! It makes it even THINNER. My bad.

I went back and looked at the drawings, and their cap wasn't used as the series jumper as I had done - it was used as a high-end BLEED to ground. In other words, ONE leg of the cap is soldered to the series junction, but the other leg goes straight to ground. This way, it's rolling off the high end of one of the pups BEFORE it goes in series to the next pup. And that DOES warm up the out of phase... BUT, during the experiment, I found that I prefered the series/out of phase thin, stinging, and biting, so I can't suggest any values for you - just try some of the common ones, and see if you find one you like.

So, with this info, it's now my INTENTION to create an HH Strat pickguard using the Five Tone Tele scheme, using a cap in the series/in phase connector, which I hope will keep a pair of humbuckers played in series from being WAY too fat. This pickguard will have a master volume and tone, and feature my rotary scheme for humbuckers – the Coil-Controller. It will rotate through three or four coil configurations (coils played in series, parallel, shunt, and maybe combos of shunt/parallel) while controlling BOTH pickups. Stay tuned!