We get questions pretty frequently on how to wire up a 5-Way Superswitch. While they are slightly complex, you can pretty easily get one wired up to your liking once you understand their fundamental construction.
The 5-Way Superswitch provides a ton of different switching possibilities. While a typical 5-way switch has 5 connection lugs, our 5-Way Superswitch has 6 lugs per stage...and there's 4 stages! Broken down further, each of the 4 stages has 5 lugs plus one common (output) lug.
Using this, you can split humbuckers into their individual coils (and choose which one you want to use, north or south). You can also combine pickups in phase/parallel, do uncommon pickup combos...lots of cool stuff.
Please understand, this blog is not a how-to...we're not experts on how to wire these switches up. We looked into creating a how-to pdf downloadable infographic on how to use these, but there are too many possibilities out there. Rather, we figured it would be best to gather some of the better resources we found on them and curate them here.
Here's an outstanding Premier Guitar article by Dirk Wacker that does a super simple job of explaining the layout of the 5-Way Superswitch:
https://www.premierguitar.com/gear/exploring-fenders-5-way-super-switch
Here's the Guitar Wiring Blog (mentioned in Dirk's article) that does a similar breakdown. Check out the rest of this site as it's just a great general resource for wiring:
http://guitarwiring.blogspot.com/search/label/pickup%20selector
Here's a Seymour Duncan forum thread where you can find a few examples of how some folks have wired up their superswitches. Note that there's some good info in here regarding the use of jumper wires, which is needed for combining pickups:
https://forum.seymourduncan.com/forum/the-pickup-lounge/312685-5-way-super-switch-wiring-help
There are a few decent videos on YouTube on superswitches, but none that we wanted to specifically reference here. Just do a search on YouTube and you will see them. They may go a long way towards helping you understand what you're looking to accomplish.
So check this stuff out, if you would like to see us doing a Superswitch explainer video, let us know. Have fun out there! To buy a Superswitch for yourself, check out the listing here.
