i gon' dunnit again!

[frobro808]

its been a while!
a while back i ordered a red-silver dually from lace to put in my bridge position of my experiment guitar. since i live in the middle of the pacific ocean (oahu, hawaii) it arrived last week.
i get excited, research the wire color-codes and make my first attempt at throwing lace sensor onto my triple shots. i hooked everything up according to:

(for SD)
www.seymourduncan.com/support/wiring-diagrams/schematics.php?schematic=color_codes

and
(for LS)
www.guitarelectronics.com/category/wiring_resources_guitar_wiring_diagrams.humbucker_wiring_color_codes/

fire up my monstrous 15 watt all SS Marshall practice amp and.... nothing... well maybe a coil but that was in the 'series mode'. all other settings were dead silent. i couldnt even figure out which coil i was getting without tapping the pup with a screw driver since it was so faint! figured it was my green hand and tried to resolder but to no avail. after the third try i thought i had burnt out the connections to the TS pad and decided to get another one. picked it up the next day... same results. i asked LS what could have gone wrong and they told me to follow the instructions and keep them posted so that wasnt much help.

desperate, i start experimenting with the color starting with flipping the north and south coil (got split modes but no buckers (the singles do sound pretty though).
then i got this 'brilliant' idea: idk if any of you have tried the duallys or any other lace HB but the conductor wires are all braided so you can see where the wires come from... sorta. so i tried comparing the diagrams from those sites and the real thing and did this:

SD. - LS
N strt: blk. - blk/org
N fin: wht. - wht/blk
S strt: red. - wht
S fin: grn. - org

hooked it up and all modes got sound! the buckers sound very out of phase with one another though. if im not mistaken i flipped the south start and finish. when i do it correctly i dont get any sound. so......

IM SOOOO LOST!!!!

the OOP humbucker modes sound ok enough to use with a bit of creativity but i just wanna hear the full potential of this pup.

WIRING GODS OF THE INTERNET, I BEG OF YOU, PLEASE LEND ME YOUR STRENGTH ONCE MORE!!!!

-frobro808

[newey]

frobro-

Welcome back!

I found this on the Lace website. Since it's their pickup, they ought to know what they're talking about:



This is the opposite of the wiring shown by the Guitar Electronics link above. While we don't have a diagram of your wiring, if you were following the Guitar Electronics color scheme for your first go-round, that might well explain the initial problem.

This would not be the first time we have found that the wiring on the guitar electronics website was "discrepant" .

Now, you have discovered the error by trial . . .

As far as your correlation to the SD colors, you have the order right, but the red is the S coil "finish", and the green is the S coil "start", as per the SD chart you linked to. The designation of "Start/Finish" is used just to avoid the "+" and "-" designations, which are electrically erroneous in an AC setting anyway. But "Start" and "Finish" aren't much help either.

I don't know if that's the problem with your current setup being OOP. I'm not clear from your post whether the coils of the Lace Duallys are OOP with each other, or whether the Lace pickup as a whole is OOP with some other undefined HB.

[frobro808]

I believe it is oop with itself.
I don't quite understand the second to the last paragraph. As exciting wiring is for me, I get very easily confused. I don't think I have the 'it' factor with wiring lol

[frobro808]

And thank you for your expedious response!

[newey]

OK, if it's OOP with itself, per the above chart, for series HB wiring (i.e., std. HB):

Orange/black to hot out
White/black connects to orange (the "series junction")
white to ground.

IOW, you need to reverse the wiring to the orange/white coil. With your SD chart:

SD = Lace
Black = Blk./Orange
White = Blk/white
Red = Orange
Green = White

Now, if you don't get any sound when it's wired that way (assuming that was what you did), then I have no answers. If so, it's a troubleshooting exercise- check the connections, test the pots, switches etc.

What I meant in the second paragraph is that "=" and "-" are terms more properly used with DC circuits. Guitar pickups are AC devices- the "+" and "-" constantly alternate, that's what AC current means by definition.

Your pickup generates AC because the direction of the signal varies with the direction of the string vibration.

Even though inaccurate, many people use + and - as a shorthand when talking about guitar pickups. Pickup manufacturers use "Start" and "Finish" instead.

The only reason that the designation matters is in terms of phase. And, as far as just the one pickup is concerned, all you really need to know is which 2 wires form the "series junction". Once you have that, the pickup will work (and be in phase with itself) regardless of whether you switch the "Start" and the "Finish" for the 2 output wires.

Which wire is the "Start" and "Finish" really only matters when combining 2 separate pickups, so as to ensure proper phase. Even then, the "Start/Finish" designation only helps if the pickups are from the same manufacturer, since it's an arbitrary designation. Different manufacturers designate different coils as the "North" or "South" coils, and different wires as the "Start".

So, if two dissimilar pickups are being combined, testing is needed to determine the proper "Start" and "Finish" anyway. With your chart, for example, we don't really know that it is a correct correlation between SD and Lace pickups because we don't know which coil is the North one magnetically and which is the South. They could be opposite between the SD and the Lace.

Some folks will call the wires "hot" and "ground", but these are technically erroneous for the same reason as + and -. Our member, the late ChrisK, used to designate the wires as "hot" and "not hot", which is as good a way as any other. It avoids using + and -, Start and Finish, hot and ground altogether.

[sumgai]

Jul 25, 2011 5:38:01 GMT -5 newey said:

Some folks will call the wires "hot" and "ground", but these are technically erroneous for the same reason as + and -. Our member, the late ChrisK, used to designate the wires as "hot" and "not hot", which is as good a way as any other. It avoids using + and -, Start and Finish, hot and ground altogether.

IIRC, Chris used to call them "signal" and "return". And for once, he wasn't being facetious.

But yeah, there was a period in there when we (The NutzHouse) went through a 'naming' discussion, and several terms were bandied about. I think Chris went his own way (the way of the Electrical Engineer), and found that he couldn't drag very many folks along with him. I did for awhile, but it got to be a drag, tryin to 'gently correct' everybody and his brother when they used 'Start', 'hot', '+', etc.

Come to think of it..... Pickup manufacturers use 'Start' and 'Finish' because of physicality, not electronics. If one were to look real close, one would find an astonishing lack of Engineering degrees amongs the pickup winding community.... Self-taught is.

On some electrical components, particularly transformers that handle power, you'll see a red dot denoting what we Nutz call the 'hot' side. (Failure to observe phase in such scenarios can cause real damage, the kind that draws the Environmental Police to the smoking crater.) But most of the time, it's a matter of preference, damage to components being nigh on to impossible (low power). The audio world is the only place where we get excited about phasing between components, because it affects how we perceive sounds. The only possible damage there is to our perceptions.

HTH



sumgai

[frobro808]

hey guys thanks for all your help and patience with me!
i'll give this another go tonight and all day tomorrow. apparently, even the guys over at lace havent really tried this combo. they know people have done it but no one updated them with how to do it they dont know/dont care. hopefully with this i can mess with some more fun sounds!

fwiw, im with chrisk with the naming game... being technically correct is the BEST kind of correct... technically

-frobro808

[frobro808]

Huh.... So you people ARE god!
I redid it. And I works!
Now I need to reconnect the old things since I hear grounding problems. And I see all the cold joints from my first time working on the guitar.

The split sounds ini the dually change much more dramatically. I think this is due to the volume difference within the p-rail's split modes. Nice SC sounds in split modes. The seies mode coming through clean is pretty driving. I know itll overdrive my tube amp if i dont control the volume but i like doing that anyway. Parallel is interesting. Eerily similar to
p-rail in parallel even though series mode is significantly different. it'll be fun firing it up with my full rig tomorrow so I can give you folks better review.
If I could upload pics and clips I would to show you the fruits of my labor and your knowledge.
Again thanks so much guys!
-frobro808

[newey]

Huh.... So you people ARE god!

There's a bunch of us, so that's called "polytheism". ;D

Seriously, glad it worked out for you. We can help with posting photos and sound clips if it's a matter of knowing how to do it- there are tutorials in "References". If it's a lack of hardware, well, there you're on your own.

[frobro808]

I fall into that second category... Paying rent hinders the necessary hardware to achieve these goals of posting stuff. Imeven have to steal pics from from other people just to update my Facebook lol!

[thetragichero]

Jul 25, 2011 12:20:38 GMT -5 sumgai said:

If one were to look real close, one would find an astonishing lack of Engineering degrees amongs the pickup winding community.... Self-taught is.

i've gotten into internet arguments with some of them regarding 20$ guitar tone capacitors.... not that i'm an EE or anything, but i dropped out of an engineering school if that counts

more on topic: i'm interested in the lace duallys because i have many lace sensors in my strats and love them. only problem is i don't have a guitar to put them in

[frobro808]

Seriously great stuff. I have it with my triple shots so I have four options that are meant to sound good!
...at least that's how I feel about them try em if yu ever get the chance?