C1 EA Pickup Swap

The reason I'm doing this video is because these pickups are not wired in this guitar the way you might suspect them to be. Because of the active system that is actually inside the guitar and you switch between the acoustic and the electric pickups, the pickups are not wired to the volume control as they would normally be. So I'm making the video so that people won't go through pulling the guitar apart for no reason. Actually what's happened is they've wired the volume control to the preamp inside the guitar. So these pickups are actually wired directly to the toggle switch over here. The question is how do we get to the toggle switch? On the back is your battery compartment. What we're going to wind up doing is pulling the battery compartment out of the guitar and accessing the switch through the hole in the back. The first thing you're going to have to do is when you open your battery compartment is you're going to remove the battery and you'll notice that it flips up and if you look down inside the hole you'll see a phillips screw at the bottom holding the base of the battery cartridge in there. If you push on the sides of this you can pop this section out. There's just these little tabs holding it on there. Be careful though because you got wires and they're pretty tight it isn't going to go very far. But you'll notice underneath this section which you couldn't see before is a second screw. So you need to get this out of the way in order to remove the two screws inside. I've removed the switch knobs so that I won't mar it with the pliers and I'm going to be trying to get a grip on it through a cloth so I don't scratch my finish like I did on the last guitar. It just takes a little tiny twist there loosen it up you'll find a washer underneath. So now I'll just push this guy down a bit so that make sure it's loose. So now you can reach in there and get your switch out like so. Okay that's how we get to the switch. Okay on the C1 EA I have removed the pickups from their cavities here and I've traced the pickup wire. The neck pickup wire just goes right through the body over to this side and they're both wired into a gray cable. Now on my last Schecter model which was the same as this was wired completely different. The purpose of me making a video was so you wouldn't make a mistake doing this and so it's much to my surprise I pulled the switch to do it the way I did on my other C1 and I had to figure out that they didn't do it that way on this one. They decided instead of running both of the pickup wires up to the switch that they would run a single wire to the switch and connect both pickups below the bridge pickup cavity here. There's a whole mess of wires in here so you got to be careful because the preamp is also in there and all the wires from the piezo are in here so it just looks like a huge spider web. But if you're very careful you can pull the pickup wires which are these black ones on this particular guitar and I know from wiring my other humbuckers which are the same models as these. These are the HB-102s and they do have a red and white wire which is used for coil tapping. On this model there is no coil tap so those two wires are connected together on each of the pickups that's why they're folded back and the green wire on these pickups are the hot wire and so when you trace the hot wires you'll find that they connect and are spliced. There's some electrical tape over the connections here. You've got a green wire going to a white wire and boy am I hoping the camera can get this. That looks like it might be okay. There's also a red wire coming out of there and a ground wire but we're only concerned with the green and white so the bridge pickup is connecting its green wire to the white wire and the neck pickup is connecting the green wire to the green wire and there's a big wad of wires here covered in tape which I'll have to remove and I'm sure that's where the ground connection is going for both of my pickups. Okay here's a little quick view of what the pickups removed and the tape removed. There's a big chunk of solder here connecting the grounds of several sources together and that is where our pickup ground was. For this wiring schematic we're not doing anything fancy. The black wire on actual Seymour Duncans will replace the green wire on the old set. The red and white are tinned together twisted and tinned and the bare ground wire and the green wire I twisted down together and tinned the end of those. So this will go where the ground connection was connected and this will go where our hot connection was which in this case is the green wire for the neck pickup but I'm going to have to put tape around this because we don't want any of these bare wires touching anything in there. What I did was took both of the ground wires from the pickups and I first joined those together and then soldered them into place. First I made a physical connection by making a loop around this really long ground wire here and then I soldered it in place as to not get this area too warm because there's so many ground wires connected there I'd have things flying off left and right. The black pickup wire from the neck pickup is connected to the green wire the black wire from the bridge pickup is connected to the white wire and on both pickups the red and white are connected together and are folded back. So the next step is to cover all of these with electrical tape stuff them neatly inside and at this point with the guitar's bridge pickup remote you have access to the preamp and there is a volume pot on the preamp that you can turn up or down and adjust how loud your piezo pickups are. So that's how the wiring goes on this guitar. Well the pickups are installed they work and it looks good too. Until next time.