A BRIEF DISCUSSION OF WIRING OPTIONS - Deaf Eddie

For Humbucking Pickups: COOL COIL TRICKSHUMBUCKERS!There are two popular types of humbuckers: the stacked-coil humbuckers, typically madefor Strats, and the traditional side-by-side-coil humbuckers, which have the look that weall associate with the term "humbucker." For the remainder of this document, we willconcern ourselves with traditional side-by-side humbuckers. A traditional humbuckingpickup is comprised of two separate coils, which are wired in series. Usually, one of thecoils will have adjustable “screw” pole pieces (designed to adjust for string-to-stringbalance), and the other coil will have non-adjustable “slug” pole pieces. These two coilsare wound in opposite directions and are reverse (magnetic) polarity from each other(RW/RP) - which means they are IN phase sonically, but the reverse winding of the twocoils will cancel most radio-frequency noise, hum and interference. Hey, two coils inphase and in series? Well, no wonder humbuckers are characterized as having that"warm" tone!WHAT IS A COIL-SHUNT?A coil-shunt is a scheme (usually accomplished by a switch) that allows the current’spath to bypass one coil of a two-coil pickup. Usually, a jumper is added that routs bothoutputs of one coil the same side of the circuit, bypassing, or "shunting," that coil's effecton the tone and volume of the pickup. Hence, the name… A humbucker played with onecoil shunted will have a brighter tone and (typically) less output. Coil-shunts are an easyoption to give another voice to your instrument, for example, to get a "Fender-ish" tonefrom a "Gibson-ish" guitar, or breath a little air into a tone that is too dark. As a personalpreference, I like to shunt the slug coil and keep the screw coil active.HUMBUCKER COILS, RUN PARALLEL:For my personal tastes, I find coil-shunting a neck pup usually gives you a fabulous newtone. However, many bridge pups lose a bit too much "oomph" and sound weak whencoil-shunt. I believe this is because they are dealing with much less kinetic energy, andhalving the impedance has a more perceivable effect on the output power and volume.One of the things I often do to address this is to turn the pup around 180 degrees, so thatthe slug coil is closer to the bridge, putting the screw coil out where there is a bit moreenergy created. I think this warms the shunted tone back up a bit, and gives it just a tadmore energy and output.But the A-1, go-to remedy for this (for me, at least) is to give the bridge pup a coils-inparalleloption. This is bright, like a coil shunt, but a bit louder, and has the addedadvantage of still giving the pickup humbucking qualities. It's a win-win deal! Toaccomplish this, all you need to do is break to connection between the two coils and giveeach coil its own path to hot and ground. Where as you can coil-shunt two pickups on asingle DP/DT switch, this mod requires both poles of the switch, and so each switch canonly run one pickup. If I'm short on switches, this is a mod I usually do for the bridgepup, and not the neck pup. As I said, most neck pups will sound pretty nice with just yourstandard coil-shunt.My favorite trick is to have both a coil-shunt and a coils-parallel option for the bridgepup, and wire the switches in such a manner that the coils-parallel switch will overridethe coil-shunt switch. So, if you have a pair of humbucker and two switches, you canhave a coil-shunt switch that works both pups, and a coils-parallel switch for the bridgepup. I find this to be the most usable setup, concerning coil-shunts and splits. If you lookat my JP-Rethink and ES-333 schemes, you will see how I accomplish this.