Monday, 26 September 2011

Replacing the Traveler Speedster guitar pickup

For all you Traveler Speedster guitar owners that are thinking about replacing the pickup I have created this blog to share my experience. My Speedster is the newer model with the dual rail humbucker pickup. The earlier models had a single coil pickup. I've replaced the dual rail pickup with a Seymour Duncan SL59-1 Little 59 Strat  Bridge Pickup and installed a miniature toggle switch allowing series and parallel configuration.

Here's the wiring of the original dual rail pickup. Note that the original pickup is wired in series.


The Seymour Duncan Little 59 can be wired in Series/Parallel using a DPDT mini-toggle switch. The wiring diagram for this configuration and the alternative Series only configuration can be downloaded from the Seymour Duncan support web site at http://www.seymourduncan.com/support/wiring-diagrams/
Note that Seymour Duncan has a different colour coding of pickup wires than the original pickup.

In the following picture you can see the mini-toggle switch installed and partially wired up. The pots have not been replaced and measure 500K.


Here's the Little 59 pickup attached to the metal surround.


The lower panel is attached to the body by 2 screws and has a cavity allowing the bridge earth wire and pickup wires through to the controls.



 Finally a picture with all the connections wired up.



I drilled the hole for the mini-toggle too close to the tone pot. I'd suggest you position it closer to the jack socket.


I bought my Speedster from http://www.playawayguitars.com

If you'd like to see some of my other guitars visit http://www.guitars4you.com

The sound of the little 59 is a bit more crisp and even across the frequency range compared to the original dual rail pickup. However it is not a big difference in my opinion. The dual rail has a resistance of 11.7K compared to the 14K of the Seymour Duncan when wired in series making the little 59 somewhat hotter!

When the little 59 is switched to parallel it gives an almost Fender Telecaster reminiscent kind of sound.

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4 comments:

  1. Junk Chime10 October 2012 at 17:54

    why not a little diagram?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Unknown20 July 2017 at 02:06

    Hi There,

    I know this is like 5 years too late, but I just bought a traveler guitar pro series, and I want to swap out the factory installed single coil with a lil ’59 as I’m a big humbucker fan over single coil.

    The problem I’m facing is that the pro series have the detachable lap rest and that connected by a standard 1/4” guitar jack.

    I’m a big confused as to where to attach the hot and ground wires to the guitar jack.

    I haven’t removed the original single coil so I’m not sure what I’m going to find inside there, so any advice on which connection is the hot and which is the ground would be helpful so I don’t muck up the wiring.

    Thanks for any help in advance.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Martin Webster20 July 2017 at 08:13

    You need get a wiring diagram for the pickup you are installing. I installed a Seymour Duncan replacement pickup and found various wiring diagrams on the Seymor Duncan web site.

    The hot wire normally goes to the tip.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Unknown7 September 2017 at 19:22

      Hi Martin,

      How did you get the wires soldered to the 1/4" jack? I tried in vain to get that thing out and all I accomplished was ripping the wires out of the single coil instead.

      Would it be too much to ask to post a simple set of instructions on how to replace the pickup and pull out the jack to do the wiring?

      Thanks

      Shawn

      Delete

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