5-way with tapped pickups wiring question

BigJoe77

BigJoe77

New member
Has anybody ever tried wiring a 5 way switch with a tapped bridge pickup in the one and three position? Would that even work?

As a quick outline, if I'm hooking a tapped tele bridge up to a neck pickup, I've done it to a 5-way where I get this:

1- Tapped bridge
2- tapped bridge + neck
3- neck
4- full bridge + neck
5- full bridge

and was curious about this:

1- tapped bridge
2- whatever
3- full bridge
4- full bridge + neck
5- neck

The 2 position is irrelevant and not something I'm overly interested in. Mostly curious if anybody else has tried this.
 
Re: 5-way with tapped pickups wiring question

yeah i think if you wire the three contacts 1-neck 2-full 3-tap you would end up with

neck
neck + full
full
full + tapped which i assume will sound just like full
tapped
 
Re: 5-way with tapped pickups wiring question

Easy enough to do. Simply put the bridge tap on the first spot and the bridge full on the middle. Position 4 (full bridge + full neck) will happen automatically since 4 is a bridge between 3 and 5, and not a separate connection.

However, that also means 2 is a bridge between 1 and 3, so you'd end up with R+W+B active at the same time. Is that split in Series? I can never remember.
 
Re: 5-way with tapped pickups wiring question

i believe that he is talking about a tapped tele pup, not splitting the coils on a humbucker
 
Re: 5-way with tapped pickups wiring question

Ah. I'm still not clear on the "tap vs split" thing. I looked it up a while back but it still makes no sense to me - it's like half a single-coil? Or what?
 
Re: 5-way with tapped pickups wiring question

yes. half to 2/3 of a single coil. they wind (making up these numbers) 5000 turns on a pup bobbin then run a hot wire, then wind another 5000 turns and put another hot wire. the start is the ground connection. if you use the first hot wire you only have 5000 turns being used. if you use the second hot wire you have all 10,000 turns which gives you a fatter and higher output tone.

tap refers to multiple hot leads and usually applies only to single coils

split is when you shunt one coil to ground and is a bucker thing
 
Re: 5-way with tapped pickups wiring question

This is one of those things I should probably just do and stop thinking about. I can't, for the life of me, explain why it seems like such a big deal to me.

Thanks for the help, all.
 
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