| Dan Armstrong Super Strat Examples The following guitars use the Dan Armstrong Super Strat pickup switching system. This modification yields the following 12 settings: * each pickup alone (three settings) * three parallel pairs * three series pairs * three pickups in parallel * three pickups in series * three pickups in series/parallel All the guitars are equipped with tone controls for each pickup. This is because when any of the pups are combined in series, each tone control only affects the tone of *its* pickup. In standard traditional wiring, turning the tone control for any pickup will affect the entire output signal. Adjusting the tone of any pickup(s) while in series offers many many additional tonal possibilities. Each guitar also has a push-pull pot that toggles the bridge humbucker between standard series coupling of the two coils and parallel coupling of the the two coils. The parallel option is the default on these guitars because that sound and output level (less output than series wired) makes a better fit with the neck and middle pickups. When I want the umpf of the humbucker in the bridge, I pull up on the pot.  The three tone control pots were necessary when I started with this guitar because each I wanted to coil tap each of the pickups and push-pull pots were the best choice. A side benefit was that each pickup also got its own tone contol. It turned out that those separate tone controls would add a lot of color to the various series combinations. These are the "particularly interesting sounds" that Dan Armstrong refers to in his Super Strat article. I found that when using pickups in series , I only used the individual tone controls Full On or Full Off. When the controls were all Full On, the sound was sometimes too woofy or muddy sounding. So I would turn a pickup's tone control to zero to remove most of that pickup's input from the output signal. For the neck and bridge in series, for example, zeroing the bridge tone produced a more powerful neck pickup sound. The sound was now single coil-ish but with the extra boom of the series connection with the bridge. For the Jewel Red guitar below, I took a different approach to the tone controls.  When I got this guitar it already had the bottom two toggle switches installed. I couldn't do the individual tone controls setup like the Fountain Blue above because the spacing of the controls wouldn't work out with those added switches. I decided to add a third toggle switch above the other two and use each as a quick Full Off tone control for each pickup. This is a much faster and efficient way to access the series tone combinations. I left the original tone control alone. For the Blue Burst guitar below, I took yet another approach to the tone controls.  The '87 radius guitars came stock with three pickup on/off toggle switches so of course I was going to do the Armstrong switching system. I didn't want to add any more holes to such a gorgeous guitar to accommodate the separate tone contols though. I finally decided to use a 6-way rotary switch. The switch replaced the stock tone control on the guitar which is no big deal since I never use the tone controls on my Ibanez guitars anyway. Position 4 is clean signal with no tone cut, position 1 is neck cut, position 2 is middle cut, position 3 is bridge cut, position 5 is middle and bridge cut, and position 6 is neck and bridge cut. The rotary switch is more cumbersome than than the toggle switches on the Jewel Red, but it allows the guitar to keep its stock appearance and I like that. For the Desert Sun Yellow guitar below, I took still another approach to the tone controls.  The '87 saber guitars came stock with three pickup on/off toggle switches so once again I was going to do the Armstrong switching system. This early model has the switches and control knobs in a tight group. A little later they all spread out some. I'm not planning on drilling holes in this guitar but I had an idea of how to get my extra tone controls (much needed for making the series combinations useful) before I even paid for the guitar. This time I used concentric pots where each control knob can do two things. My "volume" control is master volume on top, and neck tone on bottom. The "tone" control is middle tone on bottom and bridge tone on top. Everything works perfectly. There is still a lot more movement necessary to get good tone than with the individual tone toggle switches on the red 540R above (wish I hadn't sold that one) but this works and looks good too. |