Re: Humbuckers: Split or Parallel?
See to me a shunt and a split are kinda the same in result, but I guess they don't have to be, like in this case. It would seem like you could accomplish a similar thing with half a humbucker having a tapped winding, but definitely harder to construct. So on the PRS do they have a pot to dial it in or is it fixed at a certain value?
Okay just to be clear I didn't post the original quote that referred to the PRS coils so I could be missing something. But most of the time, taps have nothing to do with coil shunt or splitting. The following is very basic, I have left out a lot of the variation that is possible.
When you're winding a coil, you can stop after a specific number of winds, you can solder on a tap lead, and then continue winding until you have the total number of winds that you want and the end of the wire is now available that include all of the winds.
So with a tapped pickup, you have the choice of two different outputs. If you use the tapped output, you will only be using the number of winds completed at the tap point. However if you use the 2nd lead, it includes all of the winds. So when you use the tapped lead the tone will reflect the smaller number of winds and you will have less output.
If you use the other output you will be using all of the winds and you will get the increased output of all of those winds and the tonal changes you would expect from that number of turns.
I've left out the fact that you can have taps on inputs instead of outputs, that you can have multiple taps on a single coil and perhaps more important you can have multiple taps on multiple coils.
There is 1 approach to splitting where taps can be useful. Imagine two coils in a humbucker where one of them is simply a regular coil that is wound to the regular length of wire for that particular humbucker.
Now imagine that the second coil in that humbucker is tapped at the same number of turns as the other coil. Now imagine that the wire continues on for multiple turns so the coil becomes overwound.
It now becomes relatively simple to have a standard humbucking sound when the tapped coil is used with the regular coil. But if you choose the full length of wire from the tap coil as a single coil split from the humbucker, you can get a beefier single coil sound that can be much closer in output to the total humbucker.
There are tons of variations on this theme. vox made a really cool pickup in which both humbuckers coils were tapped so that you can have a untappd strong humbucker tone and with the flip of a switch you have the same coils tapped so that they remain noiseless but have considerable less output than untapped and the tone shift you would expect.
so there are many many things you can do with taps. Unfortunately they can be quite a challenge to wind and to test. I've destroyed more tapped coils than I have ever produced and if you want to do these more advanced tapped combinations you have to be willing to try many tap variations...so the r&D costs are high and the average user would not understand the reason they are more expensive.
Sent from my SM-G960U1 using Tapatalk
