PRS Wiring Issue

[mrbobherman]

Hi,
I'm trying to replace my prs bridge pickup with a JB. I have the 5 way selector with the PCB board and a dragon II in the neck. I've flipped the magnet and wired the JB with red in the B terminal, green and black in the R terminal and white in the w terminal. The dragon II is wired with red in the r, black in the b and white in the w. The pickup sounds good at the first and last position but sounds very thin on the rest, especially in the middle position. Sounds like the bass was sucked out. I'm not sure what I've done wrong. It was a used pickup so the magnet might have been flipped before but when I unscrewed the screws the screw heads were filled with rosen and it looked like it had never been touched.

Any ideas?

 

[Al Heeley]

Re: PRS Wiring Issue

if the pup sounds fine on its own, then the magnets must be ok. If it sounds weedy when combined with your neck dragon, then maybe its wired out of phase so the signals from the two are cancelling eachother out. This would give a thin weak treble sound with no mid or bass depth. Did you convert the wire colours over correctly?

 

[TheArchitect]

Re: PRS Wiring Issue

Hi,
I'm trying to replace my prs bridge pickup with a JB. I have the 5 way selector with the PCB board and a dragon II in the neck. I've flipped the magnet and wired the JB with red in the B terminal, green and black in the R terminal and white in the w terminal. The dragon II is wired with red in the r, black in the b and white in the w. The pickup sounds good at the first and last position but sounds very thin on the rest, especially in the middle position. Sounds like the bass was sucked out. I'm not sure what I've done wrong. It was a used pickup so the magnet might have been flipped before but when I unscrewed the screws the screw heads were filled with rosen and it looked like it had never been touched.

Any ideas?

To match with a PRS pup you need to flip the mag in JB and completely invert the wiring of the JB. So instead of white and red being soldered together the black and green are joined. So white becomes hot instead of black and red becomes ground instead of green if memmory serves. Its been a while since i have mixed Duncan and PRS pickups. The b,w, and r on the rotary simply refer to the color of the wires. Basically the duncan white, blk/grn and red replace the black white and red from PRS. Bare goes to ground on both. Check the PRS site to find out which wire is hot, ground and split on the PRS pups. I don't remember. The simply put the Duncan Hot where the PRS hot was etc.

 

[tone4days]

Re: PRS Wiring Issue

on a prs pup, the white wire takes the place of the junction between the two coils ... imagine on an SD if you were to solder the white and red wires together, solder another wire to that intersection ...

check the vault for robert_s's definitive discussion on how to merge SD and PRS pups

and yeah, it definitely sounds like a phase problem from the way you described the symptoms

good luck
t4d