Fender Mustang Rewiring I

Here's another diagram for rewiring a Mustang. This layout has the advantage of not requiring the Fender S-1 switch which is not cheap. You can get by with rewiring the switches only. The neck switch positions are off, on in-phase, on out-of-phase while the bridge positions are off, parallel, series. The one aspect of this layout that I don't like, as with the original Mustang wiring, is that you can't select the pickups with one switch.

Fender Mustang Rewiring II

Here’s a diagram for rewiring a Fender Mustang. The original Mustang wiring included two DP3T switches which allows both pickups to be turned off and on, either in phase or out of phase. With a two pickup guitar I have always like having the additional option of putting the pickups in series or parallel. It is possible to have all these options with the stock DP3T switches, and I will eventually post a diagram which shows how to do this, but after playing my Mustang for a year I realized that it is more convenient to be able to select the pickups from one switch rather than two. The diagram above allows this. The switch above the bridge pickup allows you to select the bridge pickup (neck position), both pickups (middle position) or the neck pickup (neck position). The switch above the neck pickup, as with the original wiring allows you to turn the neck pickup on in-phase (neck position), off (middle position), or on out-of-phase (bridge position). Series/parallel selection is located on the volume pot by way of a Fender S-1 switch which I bought from Darren Riley’s Guitar and Amp Shop . Use the S-1 Jazz bass knob to match the Mustang knob. These switches are 4PDT. Up is parallel, down is series. When the pickups are in series, the DP3T switch above the neck pickup still functions to allow phase selection while in series. I have only found one schematic of the S-1 switch online, located here. This diagram, while for a Stratocaster, shows the functioning of the S-1 switch clearly.

The other modification I made was to swap out the stock Mustang pickups for Fender-Lace sensors I salvaged after rewiring my Stratocaster. The original Mustang pickups are low output. I have tried both silver (modeled on a 70s single coil) and blue (modeled on a 50s humbucker) and settled on a silver sensor in the neck position and blue in the bridge position. These mods have the advantage of retaining the stock look of the Mustang. In rewiring the Mustang I also removed all the original brass shielding which was located in the control and pickup cavities and hard-wired the ground lead from the volume pot to the output jack.