Easy mods that you can do yourself to unlock new tonal possibilities from your guitar.
Today we're going to talk about the blower switch. The blower switch is a really, really cool mod that you can add. It's like pushing a button that says "Everything," or that scene in the last Jedi, when Kylo Ren is screaming "MOOOOORRRRE."
It's like that.
If you want more from your pickup or from a combination of pickups, a blower switch is a great way to do that.
So the principle behind a blower a switch is that normally all the pickups on your guitar go through a switch and some combination of individual or master volume and tone controls. But what if you could just say, you know what? I actually just want this one pickup to go straight to the output jack and bypass all of that stuff. That's what the blower switch does.
Okay, so let's see how this works. So our hot from our pickup, which is typically the white wire - for Johnny Foreigner guitars pickups, it's always the white wire - comes into terminal C1 and our output to our output jack is connected to terminal C2.
On terminal 2, we are going to send the signal to the rest of the electronic stuff that the blower switch is going to circumvent, and then whatever is the end of that signal chain with the switch and the pots is going to come back into terminal 4.
So to give you an example, say you've got a two pickup guitar, which has a three-way toggle switch, a master volume, and a master tone. That turquoise jumper from terminal three would go out to your switch and the signal from the switch would go to your master volume control, which could be the pot on the top of this push pull pot, but doesn't have to be.
Then you would loop in the tone control and then the output from that master volume would come back in on this blue jumper into terminal 4.
We're then going to add another jumper across terminals 1 and 3 to complete the setup for the blower switch.
So let's talk about what's happening here.
In the down position on the push pull, the signal comes in from the pickup hot into terminal C1, which is connected to terminal 2. That then goes off and does a little loop around your switch and your volume and tone controls, and then eventually winds its way back into terminal 4, which is connected C2, and that feeds to your output jack. So that's normal operation.
Your pickup is being routed through your switch, your volume control, your tone control, whatever else, and then eventually makes its way to the output jack.
But when the push pull is pulled up, C1 gets disconnected from 2 and C2 gets disconnected from 4, which means that that whole loop of switches and parts has been bypassed. Instead, C1 connects to 1 and that's jumpered to 3 and 3 is connected to C2, which then leads to the output jack.
So the signal chain there is clear: the pickup hot comes into C1, then to terminal 1, across to terminal 3, down to terminal C2, and then out to the output jack.
There is just a clear straight path from pickup to output jack and your switch, doesn't matter what position it's in, your volume control doesn't matter what it's set at, your tone controls; doesn't matter what they're set at. All of that is completely ignored and the pickup signal just goes straight to the output jack,
Just have a quick pull up on that, push pull pot and get a totally different sound by bypassing all of that other stuff that is normally in the signal chain. So that's it. Grab your soldeirng iron and get modding.
