Pickup wiring insight..

grappagreen

Hi Chaps,

Now that I've finally started to understand this stuff and have done some work on some of my guitars I have a question..

From a pickup wiring perspective is is better to keep the shield/earth cables as short as possible from the pickup cable outer sheath and have a longer hot wire to the selector or doesn't it matter? Just thinking from a noise perspective..

Hope this makes sense..

Si

SteveRobinson

Keep the unscreened wires as short as possible. 

elstoof

Best practice in general wiring is to keep earth connections longer than anything else, if the cable is pulled then the last thing to break will be the earth and the circuit and user are protected. I don’t think that matters too much in guitars, but if anything you’d want the signal wires as short as possible so there’s less of an “antennae” to pick up noise

ICBM

grappagreen said:

From a pickup wiring perspective is is better to keep the shield/earth cables as short as possible from the pickup cable outer sheath and have a longer hot wire to the selector or doesn't it matter? Just thinking from a noise perspective..

No, the other way round. For the lowest noise you want the shield to go as close to where the core is connected as possible while avoiding a risk of shorting against the terminal.

If you want to really go to the extreme, you can sleeve the shield with thin heatshrink, and then a larger piece over the joint to make sure it's all covered, then you can get the shield pretty much right up to the terminal.

Alternatively, if the cavity itself is well-shielded, it doesn't matter at all.

roberty

I would just prioritise making a short as unlikely as possible from any physical movement