BC Rich Mockingbird MK 5 pickup wiring?

[mrfunnyman]

I bought a set of pickups off of Craigslist out of a Mockingbird MK5 for $20. I want to put them in another guitar, but I don't know which wire is which on the pickup. The pickups have a red, white, green, and ground wire on them. Can anybody chime in and help me out?

 

[dystrust]

Re: BC Rich Mockingbird MK 5 pickup wiring?

The easiest way to figure this out would be to look in the control cavity of one of those guitars, but I wasn't able to find any pics online. According to specs I could find, they're OEM BC Rich pickups so the color codes may not be published. Based on the available specs for the guitar, we can make some educated guesses about what the wires are. The Mockingbird Mk. 5 has coil splits, so the red, white, and green wires are probably an output, ground, and coil split (similar to the red-white pair on Seymour Duncans).

If you have a multimeter, measure the resistance between each pair (red-white, red-green, green-white). I would expect one of those pairs to have double the resistance of the other two, that will be your full humbucking output and ground. If you're not going to use the coil split, tape off the third wire so that it doesn't accidentally ground against something inside the cavity. By connecting the full humbucking pair of wires and the plain ground wire, the pickup should at least work and if you're using a pair of them you *shouldn't* need to worry about them being out of phase with each other.

 

[mrfunnyman]

Re: BC Rich Mockingbird MK 5 pickup wiring?

Correction, the pickup has red, white, black, green and a bare ground coming off of it.

 

[dystrust]

Re: BC Rich Mockingbird MK 5 pickup wiring?

Correction, the pickup has red, white, black, green and a bare ground coming off of it.

In that case they're a start and finish for each coil and a dedicated ground. This page has color codes for lots of different manufacturers, though these aren't listed explicitly. You can still use a multimeter to find both coil pairs, but I don't know if you'd be able to figure out which wire corresponds to start and finish for each coil.

For example in a SD pickup the coil pairs are black / white for the north coil and red / green for south. You tie the red and white together, ground the green, and use the black as output. Provided that you've found the two coil pairs your wiring will either be correct or if you connect start to finish instead of tying both starts or both finishes together the coils will be in series and in phase with each other resulting in hum.

 

[mrfunnyman]

Re: BC Rich Mockingbird MK 5 pickup wiring?

Figured it out. Green was lead, red & white where in phase, and bare & black were ground. The pickups are really hot, but honestly don't sound bad for being overseas made.