Gilmour Mod Neck Pickup Switch

Hey Gospel Guitarist here. Today I'm going to show you how to install a neck switch for your Stratocaster. You need a double full double throw switch and two pieces of wire. Then you can have the option of having this guy on whenever you want. Okay I pulled the pick guard plate upside down to see inside. I was going to drill the hole with it on the guitar but then I decided I better make sure there's no wires where I want to put that hole because I don't want the drill bit to get caught on any of the wiring. So making sure all your wires are cleared out here. I'm going to put my hole right here. Of course I'm going to drill it from the front so that I get a nice clean hole. Just using some blue painter's tape on here. I don't need to drill to drift and before I get the hole going I don't need to drift and double checking with my finger to make sure that I don't run into anything. I want plenty of room in there. That's it. There's my nice clean little hole. Okay got my switch installed and I'm going to wire it so when it's down it's off and when it's up it's on. Which kind of coordinates with this one. If it's up here it's on. Okay I have the switch wired up now. So lug two the middle switch lug is going to the output and from this switch is going to the input on your volume control. That's with this black wire here from the center lug to the volume control. Now the purple wire is going from your net connection on your switch to the bottom or lug number three on the bottom of the switch. So both of these connections are on one side of the switch and that will allow me to turn on my neck pickup or neck pickup whenever I want to. So it's pretty simple wiring job pretty straightforward. You can use a single pole single throw switch. I have a double pole double throw switch here but you can use a single if you have one available and that's all you need. Okay before you put all the screws in you want to double check and make sure you didn't mess any wiring up putting this back in place. One final check to make sure the wiring is correct. So with the switch off I should get totally standard stuff. Just tap with a metal object and you can hear which pickups are on. It should be middle and on the neck here it's middle only middle and neck that's your and your neck. So it doesn't change any of the standard settings. Now we go back to having your bridge pickup on and these two off we throw the switch and your neck comes on. So these two will give you a tele type of tone and then when you go in the middle you've got this one on this one on and when the switch is off it's normal switch on now I have all three. Now the third position whether it's on or not it's going to duplicate the fourth position. So if it's on it's going to duplicate it in the third. So if you have a hard time trying to fiddle with your switch and get it in the fourth position you can just leave it in the third and throw this switch back and forth to pop in and out of your neck. Gives you another option anyway. So I'm happy that worked and so now to screw it all together do a little sound check. Okay since we all know what the strat sounds like I'm just going to demonstrate and compare with and without the neck pickup on the first two selector switch settings. So you can see what the new tones are. They sound very Gilmore-ish. Right now I'm running a punter strat as you can see straight into a rolling jazz chorus this first channel. So there is no reverb on that channel it's just completely dry. So you can distinctly hear the difference in the tone of the guitar itself without anything else getting in the way and I think it sounds pretty nice. Just does remind me of Gilmore's main tone. So if you just go with the bridge pickup this is what you can get. Kick in the neck pickup with your little switch. So position number two the normal sound and then when you kick in your rhythm pickup your neck pickup you're gonna have all three of them going. Of course you can play with your pickup adjustments to dial in exactly the way you want these two new settings to sound and I had to do that a little bit. I had to take a little bit of bass out on the neck pickup because it was too bassy with my bridge. I could almost the bridge was giving it a sharp edge but this one quite was kind of burying it so I brought the bridge up a little bit and took the bass out of the neck pickup a little bit without losing that nice stratty neck tone. So play with it flavor it however you want. It's a great mod to the guitar. It's absolutely great mod. Of course you can use a push-pull selector on your knobs on your pots instead of drilling a hole like I did but I like to see the switch and I don't like my knobs all up and down and weird. It's just my own pet peeve. So anyway thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed the video and I hope the audio on this part came out okay so I don't have to do this a third fourth time so please subscribe. I really enjoy doing the videos and it encourages me to keep doing so so thanks and I'll see you in the next video.