Hello,

     Thanks again to this community and the inspiration and information you offer.

     I'm about to start my variax transplant.  I've got a donor variax 500 in and I'm having a guitar custom built by a local luthier that will ultimately have 2 mag pickups (LP style), variax electronics, and a graph tech hexpander board (along with graph tech ghost bridge), all in a les paul style body.  We would like to setup the electronics so they're as minimalist as possible and as true to the LP look as possible.  Obviously with so much electronics on board, this is going to be quite a challenge.

     I've read up on this forum and gotten some good ideas from several members.  It seems that one solution (or dead end, depending on how you look at it), is to invest in expensive custom pots to provide complex-yet-minimalist controls.  At this point, I'm interested in exploring other solutions.  In particular, I'd like some advice on the possibility of using a switch to change the function of pots, push-pull pots, and rotary switches and if possible, some detailed diagrams of how to achieve this (my luthier may or may not know how to do this, but the more I can help him, the faster/cheaper this projects happens).

     Let me give some more specifics.  I have no need to blend any of the 3 parts/outputs (I'm somewhat interested in blending mag pups with hex, but I can leave that out if it makes the whole electronic setup more simple & thus more successful).  However, I would like to use just one 1/4" jack for both the mag pup and variax output, instead of 2 separate jacks.

     I've included a diagram of my setup (thanks to Matt_G for his diagram and knob ideas).  Learning from Matt_G's inquiry, I see that the expensive custom pots come into play when you try to combine any of the variax volume/tone controls with other functions.  I understand that this is because variax uses 10K pots, while LP uses 250/500K pots, so you would have to have a custom built push-pull pot or concentric pot built that can do both 10K and 250/500K.      

Pots:

Avoiding that problem, I would instead like to use 3 push-pull pots: 1) Mag neck volume(push)/tone(pull)  2) Mag bridge volume(push)/tone(pull)  3) Variax volume(push)/tone(pull).  This puts variax on its own potentiometer... the question is, can I find a push/pull 10K pot?  And how expensive will it be?

Classic LP 3-way switch:

I would like to keep the classic LP 3-way switch both in its classic location and as its classic function, namely, that of mag pickup selector.  I like the quick access of this switch and would prefer it in this form as opposed to on a rotary switch (like Matt_G's diagram).  However, this would also be an ideal place to instead put the 3-way output switch of Mag/Variax/Hex, particularly since I'm not interested in blending any of them.  But I would prefer to have the mag pickup selector here instead.

Rotary Switch:

This moves me to the problem of trying to fit hex volume, 3-way output switch, and variax 5-way switch into one more knob for a total of 5.  Here's what I'm thinking:  I could make one of the mag push/pull pots serve as a volume pot for the hex (only when it's selected, thus the pot would change functions based on the 3-way output switch).  I then could have a 5-way push/pull rotary switch where push is the 3-way output selector and pull is the 5-way variax selector.  In order for this to work, I need to know:

1. What is the ohm reading for the hex volume pot?  If it's 250 or 500K this would work quite well with one of the mag volume/tone pots.

2. Do they make push/pull rotary switches?  Are they expensive?

Other switches:

I'll also be including the original variax model selector switch and the hex program up/down switch.

So the guitar would look like this: