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Wiring Magnetic Pickup

I apologize if this is a basic and/or dumb question... I've googled and wiki'd and youtubed and searched the CBN forums for 2 hours now and still cannot find the answer...

I'm finishing my first CBG, 3-string, with a magnetic pickup. I've never installed a magnetic pickup before. It has a grey ground wire and a white wire which I assume is the "hot."

My question is, can I just solder the leads to the jack directly? Do I HAVE to put them through volume and/or tone potentiometers first? Would that be better to to anyway? Trying to keep it simple as possible. Though this is an expensive pickup to mess around with... if I must I must. Guess its just been a little too long of a project and I'm just hoping to be finally done soon!

Thanks in advance for any advice you can provide!

Kristen

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Permalink Reply by Scott aka Farmer Ted on January 9, 2013 at 4:21pm

Direct to jack is fine. But if you add a volume & tone pot it enebles the player to do a few things. First, he or she does not have to go to amplifier to turn volume up or down. Also, tone can be adjusted to suit different sounds or styles. The "Pickups & Wiring" group can help

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Permalink Reply by Clock The Wolf on January 9, 2013 at 4:27pm

I've got a Red Dog cbg (single coil pickup) and a Swamp Witch guitar (humbucker), both of which do without volume or tone pots. Many wire their pickups directly as a matter of course.

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Permalink Reply by The Phrygian Kid on January 9, 2013 at 9:46pm

Straight to the jack is fine, but you really should ground the strings somehow too, connecting the sleeve of the jack to the tailpiece or bridge usually, as well.. When you do this you can kill any buzz by just touching a string.

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Permalink Reply by Dan Sleep on January 10, 2013 at 1:52am

We also have a group for wiring questions and suggestions. There are a bunch of diagrams for how to wire stuff up as well:

http://www.cigarboxnation.com/group/cbgwiringelectronics

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Permalink Reply by Mark on January 11, 2013 at 11:03am

As long as you've got volume or gain controls (and ideally tone too) on your amp then you can get by fine without controls on the guitar. There's even a school of thought that says you might get a better sound that way (depending on what kind of sound you're after).

As Phrygian Kid says, you need to ground the strings by connecting them to the ground of the jack socket somehow. If you don't do that then they can act as antennas for any stray electromagnetic noise that happens to be around, which then gets picked up by your pickup and amplified by your amp before coming out the speaker as annoying buzz.

The wiring that runs around inside your guitar also acts as an antenna so by cutting out the controls and thus reducing the wiring you're also improving the odds on avoiding noise. (I've learned the hard way the value of having some screening around your wiring if there's a lot of circuitry on board).

Simplicity is often beautiful.