Utopia Pickup Install and Upgrades to Ibanez RG Wiring (part 2)
I set to work finishing up the additions to the pickguard…
Both pointer dots are in.
And while I did that, I gave the control and pickup cavities a generous coating of conductive shielding paint.
These on-on-on toggles will be series/single/parallel switching for each of the two humbuckers
I tried to get them lined-up as best as I could with the two pots because the could better follow the contour of the control cavity routing. The space is kinda limited in there.
As I usually try to do, I drill control holes undersize and then ream them to a tight fit.
Snug and flush.
5-way is back in (with its spacing washers).
The whole gang is together now.
Split shaft pots need something in their slot if you’re going to use them with solid shaft knobs like I’m about to. Slabs cut from guitar picks work well for this.
The new ‘control panel’ of the RG
And finally, the new pickups— which cost about as much as the guitar.
They are very visually appealing for sure. Nice depth and contrast in that design.
All three into the pickguard. I oriented the humbuckers so that they were facing opposite each other which seems typical on any dual-humbucker guitar I’ve seen. The stickers on the back all facing the same direction seemed to reinforce this choice, but later, I ended up having to rotate the bridge pickup 180 degrees into an orientation that visually ‘matched’ the orientation of the neck pickup in order to have the coil closest to the bridge the ‘hot’ coil when in single-coil mode. That’s crucial in my experience for getting the best-possible single coil bridge sound— like the one the telecaster is famous for.
Note the orange arrows pointing to the details of the two pickups facing opposite each other. This turned out to be incorrect, so I rotated the bridge pickup 180 degrees after testing.
Heat shrink to bundle the middle pickup wires.
The yellow arrow shows that these got reversed after testing— red to Ibanez’ ground and black to Ibanez’ hot.
The single coil was out of phase with either humbucker when I tried to wire according to DiMarzio’s colors and Ibanez’ 5-way. This is probably due to the Ibanez custom coil switching setup. It was a simple swap later.
I opted for the ‘triple sound’ wiring using on-on-on switches— one for each humbucker. I can have any combination of single, single/single, etc. from the 5-way and the two 3-position toggles.
The red and green wires are going to land on the toggle and the pads on the 5-way, so I branched them ahead of soldering to the switch in order to minimize heat.
Here they are, landed on the 5-way after leapfrogging off the toggle.
All wired-up . Time to dress it.
I soldered-on the grounds (string, jack, and paint) and the hot lead for the output jack.
I always put a tiny dab of this paste wax on pickguard screws, neck bolts, etc. It seems to make them go in and out easier, especially after a few years have passed. I think it hardens the surface of the compressed wood fibers in the threaded holes or something. It seems to work well, so I haven’t analyzed it too deeply.
Even this little amount of wax is probably way more than enough.
All done with the upgrades.
I didn’t have time to test right away, but when I was able to plug in I found that everything worked as expected with two exceptions:
the middle pickup was out of phase with both humbuckers and
the North coil of the bridge pickup was farthest from the bridge, so the single-coil mode wasn’t as biting (in a good, telecaster way) as I would have liked.
As I mentioned above, I flipped where the black and red wires from the single-coil middle pickup landed on the 5-way to fix problem #1, and I physically rotated the bridge pickup 180 degrees in its hole to solve problem #2.
Once both of those easy fixes were done, I played it for about an hour, using different amplifiers, effects, and settings.
The Utopia pickups impressed me a lot. They do have a ‘vintage’ kind of sound compared to the ceramic-based offerings and they have a openness to them that my go-to overwound Golden Age pickups seem to lack, so overall a big win in terms of having some new sounds available.
I may post some audio of these someday if I get time, but improving the Doepfer Trautonium, making a home for my UB-Xa D, and other things are more important to me right now.
A reminder: I’m a buffoon when it comes to woodworking, luthiery, etc. If I can do this, anyone else can totally do this better. This means you. Get your projects done!
