Re: Greenie: reverse wind AND mag flip?
Joe Perry, Noel Gallagher, Richie Sambora, Jimmy Page, and B.B. King also all use or have used out-of-phase tones with similar-spec humbuckers. Speaking of which...
P.S. are there any officially Gibson factory-issued models that featured reverse wound humbuckers?
Gibson Custom Shop and Epiphone Joe Perry 'Boneyard' Les Pauls all feature reversed neck pickups for an OOP middle tone, though whether it's reversed via the magnet or the wire is a bit of a mystery; very few people are willing to have their Custom Shop guitar deconstructed to find out, especially as the other electronics in the Gibson ones are the more fragile and expensive VOS ones. The Epiphone guitars use an unpotted Gibson Burstbucker #2 with the magnet flipped (which I can confirm myself, as I own one) but I've never found anybody reporting what their Gibson CS one is and I've never been able to get my hands on one in person to check. I expect the Epi one has the magnet flipped since it's easier to get the factory to churn out guitars when they don't have to wire anything differently; Gibson flipping the magnet in the pickup before they send the pickup to Korea is probably more fool-proof for production than asking the factory to wire some guitars up one way and other guitars up differently. And Gibson likely go wit the magnet flip since that too is much easier to double-check than setting up to reverse-wind a pickup.
But it's rather moot now since both Gibson CS and Epi versions are long out of production. Vintage guitars now produce a Peter Green ''inspired'' model which has this same configuration, though I'm pretty sure they do it just by using four-conductor pickups and wiring them out of phase in the control cavity.
Anyhoo, as someone who has most of their two/three-pickup guitars set for an out-of-phase tone, I can safely say there is
absolutely no difference in tone between reversing the wind of the pickup (which is how I had one set of custom pickups made as), flipping the magnet, or simply swapping the leads over (if the pickup is 4-conductor). At least with regular, common humbucker designs; I have no doubt somebody could come up with some massively-mismatched design which got even stranger if you messed with the wiring further (DM Bluesbucker, G Sidewinder, SD Hot Stack Tele all come to mind), but hey, I assume we're really talking about standard P.A.F.-copy humbuckers here.
So if you have a four conductor pickup and you want to try the tone, you can rewire it very simply without having to open up the pickup, or better yet wire in a push-push pot or some other similar switch so you've got the option if/when you want it but can return to normal any other time. If you don't have the pickups yet then order one with four-conductor wiring so you can try it either way around. There's no reason to use magnetically flipped or reverse-wound humbuckers since it makes no difference to the sound. The only times you should opt for a pickup that is specifically constructed to be OOP with the other pickup is if you are absolutely hell-bent on creating a replica of Peter's original guitar to the point that you're practically creating a forgery, or if you're Gibson/Epiphone/Vintage and you need to produce a lot of guitars quickly without confusing your production line. Otherwise, four-conductor is the way to go. Sorry, but there is just
no point in flipping the pickup magnetically if you're just a random messing with their guitar for funsies.
) If the pup is reverse-wound does the magnet remain the same direction? Or is it also reversed? Like a mirror opposite of bridge pickup?
