Can humbucker phase make any hearable difference?

[gimmieinfo]

First, i realize it will when combined, but i'm talking about BY ITSELF. In other words, if you have a 4 wire HB and you reverse the ground and hot wire (leaving the bare chassis ground to ground of course) Is there any difference no matter how slight? Don't take this as a total noob question, i DO realize there should be no difference but stranger things have happened.

 

[Artie]

Nope. No difference. Phase, (or properly, polarity), is only relevant to another signal. A guitar pickup has no "absolute" phase or polarity.

This is different than a speaker. Good ears can hear the difference between a single speaker connected backwords, with the right material.

 

[jeremy]

ive done the experiment with a phase switch, i dont hear a significant difference. you can hear the difference when you split coils and switch between them though.

 

[gimmieinfo]

ive done the experiment with a phase switch, i dont hear a significant difference. you can hear the difference when you split coils and switch between them though.

Yeah that's exactly why i did it. I had a switch to split them but i wanted to change which coil was active when i split them. (which was by the way an improvement) But i seemed like the full un-split sound was slightly different which i was pretty certain was just placebo but i wanted to ask anyways and see what others say. Thanks.

 

[Chistopher]

Some pedals accidentally reverse phase, such as the LPB-1.

I forget the point I was trying to make, but it's there somewhere.

 

[freefrog]

Normally, no.

I think that Brian May claims to hear the difference with his "Red Special", whose wiring is not typical.

I know that when I reverse the phase of the input on my amp for acoustic guitars (Carlsbro Sherwood), I hear the difference by comparison at the first note then it sounds the same.

All that being said, it's possible to detect a tiny wee bit of difference when reversing the phase of a pickup IF the wires in a guitar are rather long, packed altogether and therefore prone to capacitive coupling (like in a Les Paul or Explorer).

In such cases, a disabled pickup can still be heard when only the other one is selected, unless the volume of the disabled pickup is set @ 0/10.... Very, very subtle, but still there. This bleeding is sometimes evoked as "crosstalk".

See the answers 8 and 9 in the following topic. There's a link toward a video done by Pr Zollner, from the GITEC, and showing how the braided shielded wire of Gibson guitars can become highly capacitive because of humidity. It opens to capacitive coupling / bleeding / crosstalk, with pickup in phase as well as OOP (I've checked that personally on a LP with phase switch since the post 9 below).

https://www.mylespaul.com/threads/i...lst-in-bridge-position-and-vice-versa.479243/

FWIW.

 

[freefrog]

Yeah that's exactly why i did it. I had a switch to split them but i wanted to change which coil was active when i split them. (which was by the way an improvement) But i seemed like the full un-split sound was slightly different which i was pretty certain was just placebo but i wanted to ask anyways and see what others say. Thanks.

BTW, if for that you've swapped hot / ground wires and reversed the magnet, it DOES make a difference, due this time to capacitive mismatching between coils. It's not always detectable by ear but has nothing of a placebo effect.

 

[ehdwuld]

There is a slight difference when splitting to the screw coil vs the slug coil on a neck pickup

The screw coil to me sounds a bit brighter
The slug coil has a warmer sound

It may be that one is ver so slightly closer to the bridge
Or that the difference in mass for either type