[Rev Drucifer]

Good evening gents,

I just took delivery of the Devin Townsend Fishman's and want to put them in my Ibanez SZ. Try as I might, I can not fucking grasp pickup wiring. It baffles me that I can wire up an HVAC unit but when it comes to pickups, I'm a fucking moron.

The issue I'm having is that my SZ has a 4DPT switch in it for a pickup selector. Obviously, I can order a regular 3-way switch, but I want to get these installed NAOW...and I'm leaving for vacation shortly.

If it were a regular 3-way, I don't think I'd have an issue.

Devin Townsend Wiring Diagram-

https://www.fishman.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Devin-Townsend-Install-Guide.pdf

(I'm going for Devin's wiring, as I want the 3 different voices)

And the SZ wiring, unfortunately Ibanez no longer hosts it, the only one I could find was on the UG page- (half way down the page)

https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/forum/showthread.php?t=538097

I don't want to do anything special, just wire it up like Devin's but using the 4DPT switch.

Any assistance is appreciated!

I should note- the SZ is 2 vol/1 tone. I don't want to bother with the 2nd volume knob. The only difference between the wiring in the SZ and the Devin Townsend wiring is that I'll be using a 9 volt and not the rechargeable battery pack.

 

[Leon]

Battled the Fishman Classics wiring recently, sorry I couldn't chime in earlier

With just that one switch, you can switch the pickups, or switch the voices. I'd leave it on the pickups. I'm not up-to-speed on separate volumes, but we could figure that out. Did your pack come with 2 push/pull pots?

 

[Rev Drucifer]

Battled the Fishman Classics wiring recently, sorry I couldn't chime in earlier

With just that one switch, you can switch the pickups, or switch the voices. I'd leave it on the pickups. I'm not up-to-speed on separate volumes, but we could figure that out. Did your pack come with 2 push/pull pots?

It did come with 2 push/pulls. I considered using those, but since the guitar is 2 vol/1 tone, I'd have an empty space between the volume/tone knob so I'd prefer to use the little 3-way switch for the voicings.

I don't want to have 2 separate volumes, that was house the guitar came stock. I just want to wire it up for 1 vol/1 tone, 3-way pickup selector and the 3-way voicing switch.

I ended up ordering a 3-way switch last night for the pickups, so if all else fails, I can just wait until Saturday when it shows up. After doing some digging last night, I have a couple ideas to try tonight with the existing 4DPT switch. The confusing part is that there are additional wires going from that 4DPT to the pots, which I'm assuming is for the splitting the coils when in the middle position of the pickup selector.

My assumption right now is that I have to take one lead from the Fishman's and solder it to the 4DPT where the existing Duncan's are soldered to and remove the additional wires that I believe are for splitting the Duncan's. I'll snap some pics on my lunch break or when I get home today.

Why Ibanez used that 4DPT, I'll never know. It's not like the SZ offered pickup selection that was any different than every other 2 humbucker loaded guitars. It's literally just Bridge-bridge/neck-neck, with the top coils being activated in the middle position, IIRR.

I really just need to take some time to understand pickup wiring. I can solder decently, so there's no excuse at this point for not learning how to do it.

 

[Leon]

It did come with 2 push/pulls. I considered using those, but since the guitar is 2 vol/1 tone, I'd have an empty space between the volume/tone knob so I'd prefer to use the little 3-way switch for the voicings.

I don't want to have 2 separate volumes, that was house the guitar came stock. I just want to wire it up for 1 vol/1 tone, 3-way pickup selector and the 3-way voicing switch.

I ended up ordering a 3-way switch last night for the pickups, so if all else fails, I can just wait until Saturday when it shows up. After doing some digging last night, I have a couple ideas to try tonight with the existing 4DPT switch. The confusing part is that there are additional wires going from that 4DPT to the pots, which I'm assuming is for the splitting the coils when in the middle position of the pickup selector.

My assumption right now is that I have to take one lead from the Fishman's and solder it to the 4DPT where the existing Duncan's are soldered to and remove the additional wires that I believe are for splitting the Duncan's. I'll snap some pics on my lunch break or when I get home today.

Why Ibanez used that 4DPT, I'll never know. It's not like the SZ offered pickup selection that was any different than every other 2 humbucker loaded guitars. It's literally just Bridge-bridge/neck-neck, with the top coils being activated in the middle position, IIRR.

I really just need to take some time to understand pickup wiring. I can solder decently, so there's no excuse at this point for not learning how to do it.

I don't think you can do the coil-splitting with a normal 3-way toggle, and they may have had a bunch extra after ordering them for the JPM's, which I know had them.

If you need a hand, pop into the MG Discord :yesway:

 

[Rev Drucifer]

I don't think you can do the coil-splitting with a normal 3-way toggle, and they may have had a bunch extra after ordering them for the JPM's, which I know had them.

If you need a hand, pop into the MG Discord :yesway:

Thanks, mang.

I'm gutting it out now and going to make a couple attempts. I might just yank the 3-way out of the Jackson and toss it in here until the new one comes in on Saturday. Clearly, I'm an impatient little shit.

 

[Leon]

Use the 4PDT switch for the voice functions, and the regular toggle for the B/BN/N switching :yesway:

...and then use one of the provided pots for your volume, and maybe use the pull-up function as a kill-switch? :lol:

 

[1]

You need The ***.

 

[Rev Drucifer]

I just yanked the 3-way out of the Jackson and tossed it in. There was a string of snafu’s as soon as I started putting everything in, to the point it took over an hour just to get the pickups mounted and the wiring pushed into the cavity. I wanted no other shenanigans so I just grabbed that 3-way out., thinking I could toss that in within a few minutes and then get some time to actually play it tonight.

Nope.

Every time I do something with pickups, something stupid occurs that gets me right to the edge of losing my temper. Tonight, the output jack just disappeared. Spent about 45 minutes looking for it only to find that it had dropped itself into the control cavity of the guitar but tucked into it’s normal residing place, just not in any way obvious. I looked inside that cavity probably 8x and didn’t see it once. By the time I found it, dinner was ready and I figured I’ll just wait ‘til tomorrow since I was so perturbed earlier.

It’s always something. I know it’s part mental, because I get so frustrated with pickups and then any setbacks get me in that, “EVERY FUCKIN’ TIME!!”, mindset. But.....I fucking hate working with pickups.

 

[Randy]

FWIW, Frank Falbo engineered these. He's usually one PM away

 

[Leon]

It's always something. I know it's part mental, because I get so frustrated with pickups and then any setbacks get me in that, "EVERY FUCKIN' TIME!!", mindset. But.....I fucking hate working with pickups.

I feel ya, I get that way with noise in my rig :lol:

 

[Rev Drucifer]

FWIW, Frank Falbo engineered these. He's usually one PM away

I didn't know that! I should be all sorted out by the time I get home. I'm fairly calm and collected today (so far) and only have a few wires left to solder. Once I decided to 86 the 4DPT, I was good to go, it was just an issue of not melting every wire every time I put the solder iron in the cavity. Gotta say, I impressed myself with the tiny 3-way switch. That was like trying to smell a moth's balls and getting their legs spread far enough apart to get to them.

 

[1]

I feel ya, I get that way with noise in my rig :lol:

Yep, that was me last night cabling my new GSP1101 up. Spent 20 mins troubleshooting after an exhausting day. Was plugged into the wrong pedal on my sweet new pedalboard full of tuners...

 

[Leon]

It's that 100% Bypass, it's not Always A Good Thing. Very black and very sturdy, oohhh very hard, yes, but ok yeah no sound if you're plugged into the wrong one. Eee, ooo, aye, ok, aye, good, good, that's'a good.

Spoiler

 

[891]

It's always something. I know it's part mental, because I get so frustrated with pickups and then any setbacks get me in that, "EVERY FUCKIN' TIME!!", mindset. But.....I fucking hate working with pickups.

Oh my god do I feel your pain! Happy building a pedal from a kit, but put me near wiring pickups and the switch and I'm crying like a baby. A rage filled baby.

 

[1]

It's that 100% Bypass, it's not Always A Good Thing. Very black and very sturdy, oohhh very hard, yes, but ok yeah no sound if you're plugged into the wrong one. Eee, ooo, aye, ok, aye, good, good, that's'a good.

Spoiler

Seeee? Yesssssssss. Is goooooooooood.

 

[Rev Drucifer]

Oh my god do I feel your pain! Happy building a pedal from a kit, but put me near wiring pickups and the switch and I'm crying like a baby. A rage filled baby.

If everything were in-line/series, it'd make so much more sense to me. I even tried finding some vids to explain it better but that turned up empty. The one that looked promising, the guy went in depth so much he started it off with discussing protons. I just want to understand the wiring, not the in-depth science behind it. I can change my own oil, I don't need to know the science behind how an engine works to do so, ya know?

 

[Rev Drucifer]

Well, I got 'em in and working on the first try! That's a first!

As I was cutting the last piece of tape to shield the battery wiring, the razor sliced right through the tape and across the tip of my middle finger enough to have a few drops of blood. And of course it was my fretting hand.

Well, there's still plenty of chugging to be done with a bandaid, so once I got it all strung up I plugged it in and man, that's quite the difference in sound. I haven't played with active pickups for about 20 years and the stock SZ's were medium output, it's definitely going to take some getting used to. Pinch harmonics have never been so easy, that's for sure.

I really love the ability to go between Active and Classic. Classic puts the guitar allllmost back to where it was with the stock pickups, just a lot better sounding. There's a decent sized jump between the two settings. I haven't played around with clean tones yet. Gritty tones aren't nearly as shrill as before with the Classic and Split coil settings though, that's a definite improvement.

The black nickel looks great, too.

 

[Lozek]

I love my Classics and Moderns, Devins are next on my list to try.

 

[Leon]

I love my Classics and Moderns, Devins and the unreleased P90's are next on my list to try.

:agreed:

 

[Lozek]

I love my Classics and Moderns, Devins and the unreleased P90's are next on my list to try.

I do have a Les Paul copy that I was thinking about fitting with one of those Duncan P90+single, a Fishman P90 would be better.