malmsteenino

First of all thank you for your help and sorry for my bad english .... On my Variax standard the original pickups hot signal wires are not all white but white(neck), yellow(middle) and blue (bridge)... Anyway, I cutted the original pickup wires as suggested in this video, just to not mess with the PCB and soldered the new pickups on those wires and not directly to the PCB. so i considered the black wires as the ground and the colored wires as hot signals, but in position 2 it sounded really bad, it was thin and dull so i had to reverse the neck pickup wires to achieve the typical strat sound in position 2.

Yes, i followed the right connections as in the diagram you posted, but it seems that you have to reverse the bridge or the neck pickup hot/ground to achieve the right sounds in all positions. I preferred to reverse the neck pickup but i think it doesn't matter which one you choose, just reverse one of them. Now i have Area 61 in the neck, Area 61 in the middle and a tone zone in the bridge...i still had to do the reverse thing I think the circuit of the Variax is set up to accomodate the original pickups where the middle i think is RWRP because in a normal scenario you don't have to do this. It would be awesome if some user that have this configuration in a normal guitar could confirm this

I recently swapped bridge and neck pickups on my Variax standard. In the neck i choose a DiMarzio area 61 and for the bridge a tone zone. Position 1, 3 and 5 are all ok but I noticed that on position 2 (neck+middle) i have a thin sound like when you have phase issues...anyone know if the middle pickup on the Variax standard is RWRP? Position 4 sounds better but i know that the tone zone is not splitted in that position, maybe that's the reason why it sound accettable Anyone has some advice? Thank you

You are right Verne, i just tried to swap the 3pdt switch with an older one and problem is gone. It's strange but the newer one seems to be lighter at touch so that i had to fix it a little lower because i was accidentally activating/deactivating it while using the expression pedal although in this way i was having the problem to fully actuate the switch as i described. So it seems that it's impossible to find a compromise with the newer 3pdt switch. Fortunately i had an older one which is harder to actuate and i mounted a little higher, now it works like a charm! Another thing just for anyone who's interested: when i changed the switch i had to use a 20k resistor because i had no 10k left and it work well with that too!

First of all thank you for the idea. I used a donor cheap vox 845 and hooked up as Verne suggests, it works fine as expression pedal, but the switch seems to have a strange behaviour. If i push the switch by hand (so the exp pedal is not on 100% position) it switch between on and off, but if i press the pedal using the feet (so that when i'm on the max position the exp pedal is on 100%) it doesn't always switch between on and off. It's very strange, i was beginning to think the 3pdt was broken ...but it is new, just purchased online and i ask me : why it does work by hand and not by feet? Maybe i'm doing something wrong with the helix settings?