odibrom
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Regarding my friend's guitar, it could have gone way worse, had I used the same switches used for the pickup selection on each humbucker, but I didn't remind of that possibility until some time after the guitar was done, and to my defense, it was him wanting HHH and saying "I want it all", so I obliged his will.Literally, what the fuck man!
I mean, what in the actual fuck. That kind of setup is nightmare fuel for me, how on earth would you come up with such an idea
Regarding my guitars, I'm a simple guy, give me a HH+piezo guitar and I'm happy. One of my 7 stringers has 145 options, including piezo mix. The 8 stringer has exactly the same setup, but also an additional 3 way tone toggle switch, so it's 435 different tones to mess with...
I understand you, these switching schemes may sound overwhelming, but they're quite simple in fact. They're kind of dependent on each other, there's a master switch (pickup mix) and then there's each pickup coil management. All the numbers come from this concept, the count is just math. The thing is that when one goes for these kind of controls, one isn't looking at wining a competition of how many options one has on a guitar, but at ways to get these or those sounds, many others come as consequence and bonus to play with.
For example, I love the inner coils in series for a double hum guitar, having all the coils in alternating polarity. It's a tone that makes the perfect middle tone between full Neck and full Bridge, it's way deeper than the simple parallel mix between 2 full humbuckers, which is the norm derived from Gibson when they first introduced the PAF pickups. You can't find that tone in any production guitar. In order to discover these gems, one has to deep dive in crazy wiring schemes. That's what my 145 tone guitar allowed me to do, to find out of ordinary tones that work perfectly. I then replicate them in my main guitars (with way less tone options), carefully choosing between the tones I like. I'll mostly use 5 + piezos, sometimes expand this number to 7 or 8, depending on the mood or on what I'm doing/testing.