I liked the idea of this "Full Boat" layout so much that I ripped out the 3-way toggle switch, added a 4th push-pull pot and wired my Dot exactly as per the diagram in the preceding posting. Also fixed a little grounding mistake I'd made previously that caused some nasty crackling when I ran the two p'ups out-of-phase.

The controls are much more intuitive now, with the two volume pots push-pulls acting as series/parallel switches for their respective p'ups. The bridge tone pot P-P controls the phase of the bridge p'up, and the neck tone P-P is the "megabucker" switch that puts the bridge p'up in series with the neck. All I sacrificed was the coil-cut setting for the bridge p'up, which sounded almost exactly like the parallel setting anyway. No loss, IMO.

For grins, I just recorded a clip that demonstrates the "extremes" of the tonal range. It consists of the same pair of riffs played consecutively a total of four times. These four couplets are:

  1. Clean, neck pickup, all push-pulls down (stock settings)
  2. Clean, neck pickup, all push-pulls up
  3. Dirty, neck pickup, all push-pulls down (stock settings)
  4. Dirty, neck pickup, all push-pulls up


"All push-pulls up" translates as follows: both pickups with their two coils in parallel, bridge and neck out-of-phase, and the two p'ups in series. This gives one truly nasty, biting, hollow-ish tone, particularly with some distortion provided courtesy of my Radial Tonebone Classic. But don't take my word for it--listen for yourself!

http://duhvoodooman.com/audio_clips/Dot_extremes.mp3