And now onward to demystify the not so complex world of all those connection points on the bottom of 5 way import lever switches. Be warned not a lot of tech speak used. These switches are used on 3 pickup guitars to give you the classic 5 tonal combinations of bridge pickup on its own, bridge and middle pickups on together in parallel, middle pickup on its own, middle and neck pickups on together in parallel and lastly neck pickup on its own. For the sake of this explanation the bridge pickup is referred to as POSITION 1 and neck pickup is in POSITION 5 .
We are also going to refer to the connection lugs as either SIDE A ( shown left in the photo ) and SIDE B
Although there are 8 connection lugs racked up across the bottom of the switch you need to be thinking of this as two separate banks of 4 lugs that do not connect to each other. So whilst the 4 pins on the left hand side ( SIDE A ) connect up with each other in various switch positions and the 4 pins on the right ( SIDE B ) connect up with each other in various switch positions each side of the switch works independently of the other.
These types of switches operate on the same basis as the old fashioned Strat 4 lugs per side with its just that all the connectors are inline o e bottom edge of the switch.
The diagram below shows which lugs are connected when the switch is in various positions.
To wire one of these switches up in the traditional 3 pickup Start type switching arrangement goes as follows.
First thing you need to do is solder on a small jumper wire that connects the two middle lugs ( 4 and 5 ) so that both sides of the switch now physically connect up a common feed out. You then wire these two lugs up to the input lug of your volume pot ( assuming you are using just the one volume pot as in a Strat )
Now you hook your 3 pickups into the switch by soldering each of the hot / plus / positive – whatever you care to call them – wires into SIDE A of the switch in the position shown so…….
Neck positive wire goes to input lug 1
Middle positive wire goes to input lug 2
Bridge positive wire goes to input lug 3
SIDE B of the switch is where you take the fees out for whichever pickups you want to have tone controls. Typically Strat type arrangements tend to have tone controls on the neck and middle pickup and the bridge doesn’t have any tone control. I’ve shown all the 3 outputs so that you can choose which have tone controls.
If you want just the middle and neck pickups to have tone controls then obviously you don’t need a wire out for the bridge. There are other possibilities, if you wanted the neck pickup to have its own independent tone control but have the middle and neck share a tone control then you’d take the feed for the neck tone from lug 6 and then, to keep the spaghettification to a minimum, you’d run a jumper wire between lug 7 and 8 with a wire out to the other tone pot.
Thats all there is to it really. Told you it wasn’t that complicated.
