Alembic Guitars Club
Alembic products => Owning an Alembic => Troubleshooting => Topic started by: Football on January 17, 2023, 10:10:20 AM
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Hi. In case you may not be aware, a Freeway Switch is a blade type switch but with ten positions. I use it on a strat style guitar and love it. Using non-Alembic pickups on that guitar though. The switch enables other possibilities, such as bridge + neck, all pickups on at once, series/parallel configurations, etc...
Wondering if anyone has any idea if it might potentially work with the Alembic strat sized pickups and Q-Switch.
Not sure if braided shield cable could cause challenges with wiring to switch, or if Q-Switch could. I have an email into the designer but thought I'd ask here as well in case anyone is using one in a similar situation that I'm considering.
I do a somewhat more limited version of that with a mini-switch with another set of Alembic strat sized pickups I have in another guitar. Love the bridge + middle, and all pickups on.
Thank you
https://www.freewayswitch.com
Also, I attached an install diagram to this post.
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This is the reply I received from the company making the Freeway Switch.
"I'm not familiar with Alembic pickups and I'm unclear whether the pickups themselves are active. If they simply have a hot wire and shield they would appear to be passive pickups but running into an active circuit (in true Alembic style!).
If that is true, you probably could use the Free-Way 5B5-01 - however there's one issue to beware of. The pickup shield wire is insulated with a PVC sheath on these pickups (I think) but in the "series" pickup combination positions, certain shield conductors are hot rather than grounded (in order to create the series circuit) and hence more prone to pickup up hum/noise in these positions. If your guitar has adequate internal shielding this probably won't matter too much. So the pickups would go to the switch in the normal way and the output of the switch would feed into the Alembic vol/tone circuit."
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Not sure if the guitar Activators have the same connector attached to the wire like on the bass Activators, and how they attach to a blade switch. I do know all Alembic Activator pickups are passive, low impedance, and humcancelling (except the P bass shaped one). Also, you should not run a ground to the bridge but ground the pots and switches and jack by having them touching the shielding paint covering the electronics cavity.
And the Q switch works with the filter, so no use trying to connect it elsewhere.
Hope this helps ...
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Not sure if the guitar Activators have the same connector attached to the wire like on the bass Activators, and how they attach to a blade switch. I do know all Alembic Activator pickups are passive, low impedance, and humcancelling (except the P bass shaped one). Also, you should not run a ground to the bridge but ground the pots and switches and jack by having them touching the shielding paint covering the electronics cavity.
And the Q switch works with the filter, so no use trying to connect it elsewhere.
Hope this helps ...
Ok. Thank you very much. I may try to get help from a friend to wire this up with the switch at some point. If it did turn out to be noisy in the serial combinations/positions, as the Freeway switch designer is thinking possible, than I suppose it wouldn't be much different than how I already have my other Alembic assembly wired, which is just using one additional mini-switch to give me bridge + neck, and also to have all three pickups on together, so the Freeway Switch woudn't really be a big benefit if that were the case.