[darkbluemurder]

I recently acquired an Area 61 which unfortunately has a broken dummy coil. I chose to use it as a single coil in the middle position of a HSS set up (Breed neck in the bridge, Area 67 in the neck, 250k audio volume, 250k audio master tone with 0.0022uf, 500k audio tone for bridge pickup with 0.001uf). I used an Allparts 5-way multipole switch and wired it as follows:

#1 - bridge, coils in series (regular humbucking mode)
#2 - bridge with bridge side coil active + middle for the typical strat quack
#3 - bridge, coils in series + neck (I don't like the middle alone much and much prefer bridge + neck)
#4 - bridge with bridge side coil active + middle + neck (like it much better in this guitar than middle + neck which was too dark for me)
#5 - neck

All combinations are humcancelling. I did not flip the magnet in the breed - I just turned it upside down (cable exit away from the controls).

You can do that with any Area series pickup (you have to split it to keep the combinations humcancelling) or with any single coil pickup which has the same magnetic polarity and two isolated connections (which most single coil pickups have).

Cheers Stephan

[darkbluemurder]

I made a small change and assigned the previous master tone control to only control positions 2, 4 and 5. Position 1 (bridge humbucker) now only has the dedicated 500k pot with the 0.001uf cap - before the master tone control also affected position 1. I prefer this set up as I can now turn down the bridge tone pot (which is only connected in this position) and can switch to e.g. position 2 with the tone pot up (and the bridge tone not connected in this position).

Position 3 does not have a tone pot connected to but I don't miss it since this position will be used for jangly tones only.

Cheers Stephan