Tag: Warman

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2021 will see Warman Guitars concentrating on direct sales from our website.

Well it’s been a funny old year for all of us, a very different world and difficult circumstances that have caused pretty much all of us to re-evaluate life and how we go about things. We are no different, its given us cause to take stock of what we are and what we want to do.

We’ve sold on eBay for yonks and yonks ( that’s years and years for those that don’t speak Warmanese) as well as selling on our own site. Gradually it’s started to feel more like we are employees of eBay with a very over bearing boss who controls our every breath than masters of our own tiddly destiny. We’ve been a Top Rated Seller on there for 10 years plus with a huge feedback score etc but Oh My Word do you have to jump through administrative hoops and increasing costs to do so and maintain their sparkly badge of honour.

It also causes a nightmare on stock as we have to split our physical stock between our site and the eBay store meaning that at times our own site is short on stock – that’s the place where our loyal customers shop – and the eBay store has stock for casual one off buyers. It’s something that has always griped us.I could go on as the list is huge as to things that aren’t quite right but…………..

In short – it does my head in.

So we are going to try a little experiment.

We’ve currently suspended the eBay store for a month and will only be selling through our own website during this period. Our own site has always sold at around 10% less than the eBay price and increasingly people have started to realise this. Hopefully more and more will do so as the weeks roll by.

We are still very much alive and kicking and active, just concentrating on direct sales through our own site rather than running round like headless chickens satisfying the hunger of eBays coffers

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Basic guitar circuit wiring – Part 2

2 single coils pickups, 3 way selector switch, 2 volume controls and 2 tone controls.

Following on from earlier here is the diagram expanded a bit to show wiring for 2 pickups, each with independent volume and tone controls and the typical 3 way selector switch giving the option of neck pickup alone, both pickups on in parallel or bridge pickup on its own. We simply swap the switch section to the other side of the pots.

As you can see, if you compare it to the earlier diagram, the signal / hot wire from the pickup show goes direct to the input lug of the volume control rather than straight to the switch. Thats simply because you want to control the volume of the individual pickup before it gets to the switch selection stage giving you the option of having each pickups set to different volumes before you select it.

Again although the diagram shows the wiring for 2 single coils it remains the same if you are using humbuckers except for changing the pots to 500k.

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Working out humbucker wire colours.

Ah – the dark art of what colour wire goes where !

Well not really, its actually pretty easy to work this out without being given the exact wire colours on a pickup, provided its come straight out of the packet or still wired up as standard. Not rocket science, just a bit of common sense. Heres a photo of our standard end of the wire.

As you can see there are 5 separate wires sticking out the end of the main cable insulation.

Lets take that black one first that is connected to the bare wire. The bare wire is always the overall chassis earth of the pickup and is the one that is soldered to the baseplate of the pickup so its going to have to connect to the earth circuit on your guitar. The black wire is pre-soldered onto it so, here’s the clue, thats the negative wire of the humbucker as we have already connected it to the other earth wire and it needs to connect to the earth circuit of the guitar – that’s kind of why we solder them together before they get shipped out.

You know its a 2 coil pickup, as you bought a humbucker, so theres got to be a connection between those 2 separate coils else the whole thing wont work right ? As you can see there are 2 wires connected up together that aren’t part of the earth connection of the guitar – Bingo – the red and white wires link the 2 coils of the humbucker together.

The leaves us with just one wire unaccounted for and that’s the green. By a simple process of elimination that has to be the output / hot wire of the pickup. Thats the one that’s going to have to go to either your selector switch or the input lug on your volume pot.

Told you it was quite easy to work out.

Gets a little more complex working out which are the hot and negative wires of each coil but its still not rocket science. You already know which is the negative of the first coil – the black wire. You also know which is the positive / hot wire of the second coil – the green wire. Now you’ll need to get some sort of continuity tester or multi meter to help with this bit and you’ll need to separate the white wire from the red. You can usually just pull them apart.

Start by connecting one lead from your multimeter to the black wire ( the negative of the first coil ) and then connect the other lead to either the red or the white wire to see which one gives you a continuity signal. That identifies the hot wire from the first coil – if you don’t want to know the answer without testing then look away now and don’t read this bit – its going to be the white wire on our pickups. You’ve got a continuity signal then between the back wire and the white, so you now know the negative and positive leads of the first coil.

You don’t even need to test for the positive and negative leads of the second coil as you already know that the green wire is the positive lead of coil 2 so therefore the red wire just has to be the negative lead of the 2nd coil.

Also if you want a quick and dirty method of working out which pickup is the bridge and neck, and you can’t be bothered to turn them over to look for the B or N stamp on the back, then matched humbucker pairs have red heat shrink on the end of the cable and neck ones have black heat shrink.