Tired, burnt, annoyed and lied to.

[D1m3b4g2]

I've got an Ibanez Jem 7VSBL guitar which I love playing.
One of the wires (for some reason yellow) came loose the other day and basically I got no sound at all from the guitar. I worked out it was the pot to pot cable that effectively grounds the top of it. No problems.
I soldered it back together and got a sound out of the guitar, but something was strange, the sound wasn't right. The bridge wasnt that far removed from the neck soundwise, no real definition, pinched harmonics etc would hardly show up.

I'd always thought that the pickups sounded wrong... the bridge pickup is (was) nowhere near as bright as my other Jem's and I got the impression the guy I bought it off liked fiddling and building guitars so I was convinced the guitar was not wired up correctly.

I looked up the official ibanez wiring diagram here:
http://www.ibanez.com/support/wiringdiagrams.aspx

Stuck in "Guitar, 2002, Ibanez Jem 7" (its not a 7VWH but the diagrams appear the same anyway). The guitar does have evo's in it as well as the middle Dimarzio Iscv2 Evolution Single Coil Pickup in the middle, there is a sticker on it which says so, no reason to doubt.

After looking at the wiring diagram the pickups were indeed wired totally differently to the diagram, not just the colours of the wires but the positions on the massively complex selector switch too.

So I unsoldered all the wires, put the black ones and the white ones together with a little solder and set about wiring the wires to the correct places. It took me about 2 hours in all because of the complete lack of length on the pickup cables and the stupidly thin wires that are reiduclously hard to get a good contact with, twist due to their thinness and their lovely ability to completely snap at the joint with a tiny bit of pressure.

So basically 2 hours down and some horrific burns on my finger (one right on my left index finger, got a gig on saturday) and I plug the guitar back in after checking the joints for a clean contact, not touching any other contacts etc.

Bridge pickup - nothing.
Bridge + single coil, a sound.
Middle pickup - nothing
Neck + single coil, a sound.
Neck pickup - nothing.

To say I am unimpressed and demoralised is not even close to how I feel now.
I can't see how the wiring diagrams on both the dimarzio site:
http://www.dimarzio.com//media/diagrams/C.pdf

and the official ibanez wiring diagram are true at all... they simply don't match up with how I was getting a sound out of the jem before (red and green twisted together, white as ground and black as live), nor the positions where the wires were soldered.

Is anyone out there able to suggest a way I can get this sorted?
Would anyone around the Reading area of the UK (or the south, southampton, winchester, portsmouth) be willing or able to sort this mess out for me for payment?
I'm 100% through with getting burnt, ****ing around with soldering pissy little wires onto awkward placeholders and wiring diagrams that completely lie about the colour coding of the wires i'm dealing with.

Can anyone out there at least confirm that Red is hot/live?
It seems to me that black was hot/live on my pickups before, or at least they were wired that way. Red/Green seem to have taken the place of white/black which I find amazing to consider and I've got white as ground which to me would be unheard of. Either red or black surely?

Please someone help me because my guitar is screwed now, utterly screwed.
I almost feel ibanez / dimarzio should be helping me out here by providing a wiring diagram that isn't a blatant lie.

[ryanb]

If I had to guess, I would say that you probably don't have the original switch -- the switch used in the diagram. The guy before you , who liked to play with the wiring, probably put in a megaswitch ("massively complex selector switch") to get more options, but that wouldn't get wired the same way as your diagram. Check what switch you actually have. Either way, you should be able to get the right result, but start out by knowing what parts you are working with.

[Matheau]

The Dimarzio diagram is right, I used that exact one when I did my RG-517 wiring. I still have it saved to my computer, even double checked and it is exactly the same.

Really can't say what is wrong. Could be something like having the cables on the output jack flipped or having an output wire accidentally touching a ground somewhere.

[ScottB]

[Jaden]

if you can send some pics to me I will help today as much as possible..
my e-mail addy is in my profile of course

pics of the switch would help as well as the way its wired right now.

[D1m3b4g2]

Thanks for the replies... time to straighten a few things out here.

Firstly the switch is completly original, it has the OTAX engraving and the VLX91 stickers on the switch just like in the diagram. The previous owner did like messing with guitars but the switch in the jem is original in this case, however I stand by saying it is massively ott seeing as it uses about 5 or 6 pins but has about 24 on it in total.

I'm also at a bit of a loss of your post Scott B, I explained that I had gone to the ibanez site (even posted the link) and looked up the same diagram that you've posted here. That is the very diagram that I was working from last night. I appreciate you trying to help but posting something that I'd already explained I was using seems a bit futile and almost like you're trying to rub it in. Especially with no text as a reply.

Everything in the guitar actually seems stock, although lets reclarify here:

In the wiring diagram it shows black and white twisted together and attached to certain pins.

Red and green were twisted together and soldered. The diagram shows black/white.
White was used in my guitar for ground. The diagram shows Green.
Black was used in my guitar for hot/live. The diagram shows Red.

My evo middle pickup has a red/black cables comming out of it, the diagram shows red/green.
I had a look on the dimarzio site which doesnt help too much in the case because the switch in their diagram is totally different, but it explains in their pdf that the jem middle pickup is black red which helps a bit.

I am certain the pickups are white dimarzio evo's I've checked the caps and the reserse of the pickups and have grabbed the patent number off the pickups and checked it online. Something like US PAT 4.105.blah blah. Can't remember, guitar is at home. I will of course be happy to take some pictures and paste them on here or paste some links to my hosting, I'll do this later on when I get home. Luckily I'm probably a few hours ahead of you guys so I'll be able to catch up with you whilst you're all still awake

PS I am CERTAIN that I wired up *everything* in the way the diagram has quoted to do.
It took me literally over an hour to achieve this and make sure that everything was just as it said.

I'm stll unable to answer the question in my own head, if red and green were twisted together instead of black and white, and red and green are hot/ground how the hell was I getting a noise out of the thing in the first place?

Cheers

Paul

[Matheau]

Keep in mind the guitar doesn't need to be wired correctly in order for getting sound out of it. I accidentally swapped the ground and output when I did the jack, I did get sound out of it, even a little bit of a signal.

I'm not familiar with the switch, so I can't say about the connections, but it seems that the only difference on the Ibanez diagram is that green = black on the single coil.

Maybe someone was trying to wire it in parallel, which is why they twisted red and green. I think it is actually green and white twisted together, though.

[Ibateur]

Do the humbuckers have a code number under them? They should I think.

What I would suggest, while being tedious, is to wire up the pickups individually direct to the output, bypassing tone and volume, to see if they are actually alive. Using the screwdriver "technique" you'll be able to check if they are alive. If they are, you can string it up and see if the tone is good.

After checking and ensuring each pickup is alive and is genuine, and has good tone, you can wire things up into the switch. You might think of using other switches.

Or, indeed take it to a tech and have them sort it out.

My fear is that your pickups are bad (bad = fake, rewound (badly), replaced with lookalikes).

ScottB's diagram is for a UV <-- this is wrong, my bad.

[D1m3b4g2]

Yo

The pickups are both genuine and both work, they have worked fine before the wire came lose / i tried to rewire it. I know they are not faulty as the guitar used to work just fine before the wire came loose. Like I said before though, I doubted the wiring because the bridge didn't appear bright enough, it was almost as if the bridge/neck were wired to each other's positions on the switch and some how cancelled out to have too much of a similar sound. What i mean is the bridge sounded a bit dulled like a neck pickup and the neck sounded a little too bright for a neck, as if the distinction between the two had somehow gone and they'd merged into more or less the same sound.

Like I said in the last post I've checked the pattent number / sticker on the bottom of the pickup and they are genuine evos. I've got the dimarzio cap on top of them too. Even the middle pickup is a genuine evo pickup so don't worry about that.

Both humcukers are fine and working, I think that all I really need to get totally clear here is the colour coding of the wires. I think where the wiring diagram might be correct, I dont think the colour coding of the wires on my dimarzios are the same. Is that possible?

[Ibateur]

There have been situations where the dimarzio wiring was off. Some oldies here can probably confirm that more than I can. I would call that rare though.

If you can play around with the wires, I'm sure you will get it eventually.

Moral support from me for that.

[Jaden]

this might help if a megaswitch has been installed



if its a vlx91 then you should already have the correct drawing from ibanez.

[Rich]

You can wire it 10 different ways to get the same result. The Ibanez diagram is correct, so are many others. Obviously you have something wrong and blaming the diagram wouldn't be the way to go about fixing it. Check all the jumpers and retrace all the wiring again making sure you didn't wire something to the wrong bank.

[Devo]

hey man,

can you take a nice pic of the wiring and post it here. Without seeing a pic or its quite hard to tell what the probelm is.


Steve

[fyrie]

I have a 2002 VSBL that I bought used and it too was wired up in a totally different way than any diagram I've been able to find on Ibanez's or Dimarzio's sites. I am pretty sure that it was wired this way from the factory as the switch was an OTAX switch and the soldering was immaculate. see this thread for more info:

http://www.jemsite.com/forums/f35/wi...2-a-40312.html

NOTE: Be sure to check the 2nd time I list the wiring in that thread. I didn't notice at first that there were some very small bands of metal soldered on to bridge some of the connectors.

I have to say that my guitar sounds way different than a 7VWH I played recently. The tone is much thinner on my VSBL.

[plugger]

Sounds likely you've got some bad solder joints, some short circuits, or both. Uploading photos aren't likely to be of much use there.

Soldering isn't rocket science, but it does require a little skill to do it reliably and cleanly. From the sounds of your self-inflicted injuries etc., my guess is that you're probably not skilled enough for this project. Also, you don't mention continuity checking, or any other basic troubleshooting steps you've done. Finally, your "victim" attitude (I've been _lied_ to!!!) doesn't sound like it's helping either.

My advice is to take it to someone with the skill, knowledge, and temperament to get the job done properly.