Fender offset switching: simples surely?

The mystery! The Horror ™

Or is it? Come now, come now. It's easy. It's also very cool. You can set up a warm tone on the rhythm circuit and instantly switch to an ice picky jab in the pineal gland at the flick of one wee switch.

Top panel has one switch and 2 pots mounted sideways and operated by wheels inset into the pick guard. Pull the switch up to you and become Wes Montgomery.
Flick it down and be Link Wray or break glass from 50 metres through a Fender Twin Reverb in 10 seconds.

The 'normal circuit' is just that. Three switches, one for each pickup and a weird switch that everyone but Johnny Marr doesn't use very much - the 'Strangle Switch'. It apparently only targets those nasty bass frequencies that rob your Twin Reverb of the power to beam solid arcs of high end into the room. It's really a bass cut and quite subtle really; just a capacitor that filters of the low end.

​The thing about offsets is the 1 Meg ohm pots. This is the big secret and you may already know this or not.
The volume control is the biggest tone shaper of the lot. Full up and you get the high end that most people associate with the Jaguar and Jazzmaster offset guitars but start rolling it back and the high end rolls off too quite quickly, so at 8 or so, the guitars sound have the same spectrum as a Stratocaster or Telecaster.

Imagine if a Telecaster came with 1 Meg ohm potentiometers. Good God. I don't think the world would be ready for that. A Telecaster with 1 Meg ohm pots is like a vampire crossed with a Honey Badger who is invisible and coated with bubonic plague. 

​A Stratocaster is so thin and clanky it might collapse into a frequency band so  narrow it could split electrons if you fitted 1 Meg pots to it. They fitted 250k ohm for a reason!

Anyway, the offset switching can be super subtle and interactive with the ability to preset tones on the two circuits independently for those mid song jabby bits that make the sound guy wince and beer glasses shatter in the hands of the audience.

This is a demo for you and I go through the combinations pretty randomly I have to say.

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