Wiring PJ bass with series/parallel for P and series/parallel between pickups?

Nov 2, 2018
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Hey TB,

What I want to do on my PJ bass is to wire the P pickup with a series/parallel switch, and also wire a series/parallel switch for the P/J pickups in respect to each other. Does this make sense? While I would appreciate any tonal feedback you guys could give, this is much more for my own learning of how the wiring would work.

Because I can't find a wiring diagram that has both of these changes in one, I'm working from these two diagrams right now but I just can't wrap my mind around how they combine:

JazzBass_2VppSP_1T.pdf

Pbass_1VppSP_1T.pdf

The P pickup will be wired to a push/pull pot for series/parallel, and then do I just treat the two leads coming from that push/pull pot as the regular Jazz neck pickup in the Jazz series/parallel diagram? Do I wire the pots the variable resistor way or the voltage sweep way?

Thanks
 
You can't have series/parallel for the split-coil pickup AND a series/parallel between the two pickups.

other potential problems:

If your split-coil pickup isn't high-output, it will be next to useless in parallel.

If your bridge pickup is not a hum-canceling version, putting it in series with the split-coil pickup will just make it noisier.
 
So I'm using the Split P from dimarzio, so I guess you count each of them as separate humbuckers.

Can you possibly explain to me why you can't have both switches? I seem to remember watching a vid of a guy with a PJ bass having this same mod, would go parallel split coils and have those parallel to the j bridge to get that jazz bass sound, but also have series split coils and a series switch between pickups to get a lot of output from both pickups. Maybe I'm very wrong tho...