Re: Moronic Coil Splitting Question
So I have a Jazz in the neck of one of my guitars and it's wired in the stock manner so that it splits to the stud (inside) coil. I'd like it to split to the outside coil instead. I know I could rewire it to do so, but would that then make it out of phase with the single coil in the middle position? In which case, would I be better off just physically turning the pickup around so the stud coil was outside and the screw coil was inside?
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Austin
It won't be out of phase, but it might double noise (or it might cancel it out completely); it depends on whether you have a "standard" single coil (a North coil by SD's standards) or a RWRP middle pickup like from a calibrated Strat set. If you have a standard pickup, then changing the neck pickup split to use the top coil will double elecromagnetic noise. If you have a RWRP pickup, using the top coil will cancel out noise.
I'm a tinkerer, so if this were my axe I'd go ahead and rewire to get the coil I wanted. Taking it one step further, if this is an HSH, you can use two push-pulls to split and coil-select the two humbuckers, so that you can get true single-coil tones from the humbuckers that will hum-cancel in any position. Here's the wiring for one pickup through both switches:
View attachment 48085
In series mode, the first switch doesn't connect the two pickup leads (white and red) to the black lead, so current flows from one coil directly into the other as it normally would in a pickup with two-conductor leads. In split, these two are now connected, so this middle point of the pickup gets connected to the second switch. Here, this lead is connected either to ground (shorting out the bottom coil, leaving the top) or to hot (shorting out the top, leaving the bottom).
Because this scheme uses only one set of poles from each switch, you can use the other half of each switch for your other humbucker, and with a little extra trickeration in the pickup switching to select either the middle pickup (if you're using an LP 3-way for the humbuckers) or the neck pickup (using a Strat 5-way) in combination with the others, you can get any combination of neck, middle and bridge in either single or humbucking mode, and in single-coil mode you can wire this so you get hum-cancelling combinations of the humbucker coils (inside or outside), as well as hum-cancelling combinations of either pickup with the middle.
