A diagram showing the wiring of a Gibson Les Paul electric guitar. Shown are the humbucker pickups with individual tone and volume controls (T and V, respectively), 3-way pickup selector switch, tone capacitors that form a passive low-pass filter, the output jack and connections between those components. The top right shows a modification that allows both pickups to have their volumes adjusted independently when the selector switch is in the middle position: the two bottom connections are simply swapped on each volume potentiometer.
Guitar wiring refers to the electrical components, and interconnections thereof, inside an electric guitar (and, by extension, other electric instruments like the bass guitar or mandolin). It most commonly consists of pickups, potentiometers to adjust volume and tone, a switch to select between different pickups (if the instrument has more than one), and the output socket. There may be additional controls for specific functions; the most common of these are described below.
