Does flipping the hot and ground connections affect the tone of a pickup?

[GotTone]

I have a Steinberger Spirit guitar which originally came with EMG Select pickups in a H-S-H configuration. I love the guitar, but the stock pickups leave much to be desired.

I just installed an Alnico II Pro pickup in the neck position. The neck pickup by itself sounds incredible, but when the guitar is switched to use both neck and middle pickups, there is a substantial drop in volume. From doing research on this board, I'm thinking that I have an out of phase wiring problem.

I have a few questions on how to fix this:

1) If this is an out of phase problem, would I just have to flip the connections of the hot and ground wires of my Alnico II Pro pickup?

2) Does flipping the hot and ground wires change the sound of that pickup in any way? I don't want the sound of my Alnico II Pro neck pickup to change when I'm using that pickup on it's own.

 

[Artie]

Re: Does flipping the hot and ground connections affect the tone of a pickup?

No problem. Flipping the wires only affects the pups phase in relation to other pups. It won't affect the AII Pro's sound at all. Enjoy.

 

[octavedoctor]

Re: Does flipping the hot and ground connections affect the tone of a pickup?

There is a slight effect in that each coil has a "blind" and an "open" end. The blind end being closest to the pole pieces. Taking the signal output from the blind end of the coil improves noise reduction by making the outer coils part of the earth circuit. So the outer coils effectively "screen" the inner coils. If you have screening foil or covers on the pickup it will also reduce the capacitance effect inherent in this. The trade off is that there will be some inductive coupling between pole pieces and the signal wire, manifested by a buzz if you touch the pole pieces.

Swapping the signal and earth wires (or hot and ground as you statesiders insist on calling them ) will change this.

Also, I presume we are talking about the APS1 and not the APH1? If it's the APH1 you can't just flip signal and ground wires you have to remeber to separate the screen wire as well...

Unless you have single core braided, then it gets much more complicated.