Are my pickups wired wrong?

[Tomrus]

I have a Jackson Kelly KE3R mid-90s (maybe 1996) model with 2 Duncan Designed HB-103 pickups wired like this photo.

Recentlty I had to resolder 1 wire and noticed that on this guitar the green wires from both pickups are soldered to the 3 way Switch, and the black wires, which are a beefyer wire than green, red and white, are soldered to ground. All schematics I can find shows Black is hot and green is ground.

[Jack_TriPpEr]

According to this older thread on this forum (link pasted below my comments here), the wiring color for Duncan Designed pups is the same as normal Duncans BUT the Duncan Designed pups have their magnets oriented opposite of a normal Duncan.

That magnet orientation does matter when the wiring scheme splits the coils of a humbucker, in order to choose the coil from the humbucker pickup that will be hum-canceling with the other coil it is beinf combined with.

My suspicion is that Jackson used Duncan Designed pups in other models of their guitars that do feature coilsplitting of humbuckers, like SSH and HSH models, and that drove them to wire the Duncan Designed pups in those guitars with Green wire as Hot instead of Black wire. And (continuing with my theory) even though your guitar doesn't feature any coilsplitting, they also wired it the same way in your HH guitar because from a Manufacturing Production Processes efficiency standpoint, there was no actual NEED to wire yours with Black as Hot wire when using Green as Hot worked just fine. By not deviatinf in how they wired the pups, they didn't have to train their workers in an unnecessary distinction. You may not be familiar with how phase relationships work in pickups so you may be thinking that using Green as Hot instead of Black should be causing an Out Of Phase problem, but it doesn't because BOTH pickups in your guitar are wired with Green as Hot. In order to obtain an Out Of Phase sound, only one of the pickups gets wired in reverse.

https://forum.seymourduncan.com/foru...uction-duncans

And it sounds like from your original post that everything does sound normal - there's no actual problem - you're just curious as to why it's wired this way?

[jeremy]

it doesnt really matter. typically the black is hot and green is ground, but it works just fine the other way. by flipping the black and green you flip the phase but since both are switched you are still in phase. no reason to change anything

[AlexR]

There is no such thing as absolute phase orientation......as in 1 way works and the other doesn't. The signal is identical either way as you are dealing with AC - which reverses direction of current flow thousands of times every second.
Black is the conventional hot wire with regular Duncans only because the choice of a default split was to the slug coil. They could equally have chosen green.

But in your case the thicker black wire could indicate the import multistrand wire carries both the signal and the chassis ground together.

[Tomrus]

Thank you for all responses.

Yes, the guitar works fine. I just saw there had been someone before me doing a very bad soldering job when I opened it, so I decided to look up the schematics and got worried they did it all wrong.

Your theory sounds absolutely plausibel to me @ Jack_TriPpEr. When you say the magnets are oriented opposite, does that mean that on DD's North is under the screws and South is under the slugs?

@All, I take it there will be no tonal differences in changing the leads then?

I also found schematics showing Jackson pickups to be wired like this, so I guess they just copied early DD's and carried on.

[Jack_TriPpEr]

Jack_TriPpEr. When you say the magnets are oriented opposite, does that mean that on DD's North is under the screws and South is under the slugs?

Yes, according to the thread I posted a link to earlier.

@All, I take it there will be no tonal differences in changing the leads then.

makes zero tonal difference.