Goodies Arrive in the Mail

I returned home from a trip and found two boxes of goodies, one from Acme Guitar Works, the other from Guitar Fetish.  The latter contained my new trem, which was promised to be a drop-in replacement for the one in my bullet.  This proved to be true, but only because it's a genuine cobocaster which has a thicker body.  However ... the bridge doesn't quite drop in because the pickguard is in the way.  I think it wasn't placed exactly right on the body, so now I have to cut a little bit off the pickguard.  I'll probably be impatient and do this with a dremel rather than file it patiently.

With any luck, my neck will arrive tomorrow and I can start to reassemble this thing.

The package from Acme contained two pots and some nice wire.  The pots are a blender pot and a push/pull pot.  I have some not quite fully baked ideas about how I want to wire it up. I've been reading a lot - articles online, plus a book by T.A. Swike.  The book has many good points, but as the Amazon reviewers point out, is printed in black & white, is short on theory (around 100% short), and needs editing.  Oddly, the book gives a link to a freely available color PDF of the text.  Even more oddly, he's selling it for $14.95 on lulu.com: http://stores.lulu.com/snotboards - yes, that says "snotboards". It seems like T.A. is trying to figure out the best way to to do electronic publishing and is trying many things.  His main thing seems to be skateboards. In any event, it did help me understand quite a bit, so that's good.

Wiring Plans

I don't use the controls on my guitar very much.  I'm always impressed when I see people fiddling with the controls in the middle of a solo, as though they're thinking "ok, this is the part where I need more treble, now to add a bit of volume,...".   I'm not good enough to handle the disruption to playing this causes, and really I just need a volume control I suppose.  However that's not much fun. So as of now, I'm thinking of doing this:

• Regular volume control
• First tone control is the single tone control for all pickups.  It uses a push/pull pot which, when "pulled", bypasses both the volume and tone pots, giving a boost.  It might sound terrible of course ... we'll see.
• Second tone control is a blender pot which impacts which pickups are included in the output; a good description is on the Acme Guitar Works site.  Essentially, when turned to "10" it has no effect.  As it is rotated counterclockwise, it mixes in another pickup, depending on which pickups are selected with the 5-way switch.  There's a thread on strat-talk that might be useful for understanding how it works.
• Neck and 2nd Position - blends in bridge pickup
• 3rd Position - no effect
• 4th and Bridge Position - blends in neck pickup