Post by chase on Jul 29, 2012 14:34:01 GMT -5
This came up in the Fender S-1 switch thread:
guitarnuts2.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=wiring&action=display&thread=6423
...but seemed worth breaking out into its own discussion.
However, these aren't actually HBs. They are true single coils with a winding tap. They aren't meant to have the Black to White shunted together. You select either the White (partial winding) or Red (full winding) as the hot. The Black is always grounded.
But you've still basically got two coils of wire - the top half and the bottom half. It's exactly like a 3-wire HB where the "series link" is internal to the pickup with only one wire exposed to the world. And when you switch to that middle wire you've still got the top half of the coil hanging "upside down" from hot. I still believe that shunting one or the other will give better noise performance.
It's something I've been wondering about recently too - if, as ashcatlt points out, you wire a tapped pickup conventionally, you ground the inside end of the wire (black in this case) and then switch the output between the middle (white) and the outside end (red) depending on whether you want the tapped output or the full Malmsteen, but in the tapped position you will have the outer half hanging from hot and adding noise to the circuit.
ashcatlt's suggestion is to shunt the white/middle wire to ground instead and just take the output from the red/top. The problem with this approach is that you're using the outer/upper winds of the pickup when tapped, and if the tap is not exactly in the middle you may also be getting the weaker of the two sections of coil. For instance, if you have a 9k pickup tapped at 6k, doing it this way would give you the 3k length rather than the 6k length.
It occurs to me that an alternative approach would be to make the inside end of the wire (black) the output and the outside end (red) the ground, and then to route the middle (white) to ground whenever you want to tap the pickup. This way you always get the inner windings and you never have anything hanging hot. The one catch is that this also reverses the phase of the pickup, but if you wire all of your pickups the same way, they'll still be in phase with each other.
It also assumes that black is on the inside and red on the outside, but as the conventional way to wire a tapped pickup is to switch the output rather than switching the ground, that would suggest that the inner windings are between black and white, not white and red.
It's also possible this is a moot point, since the coil segment that hangs hot in the conventional setup is also phase reversed and thus might actually *reduce* noise by cancelling the noise coming from the lower/inner winding, no?
Thoughts?
guitarnuts2.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=wiring&action=display&thread=6423
...but seemed worth breaking out into its own discussion.
However, these aren't actually HBs. They are true single coils with a winding tap. They aren't meant to have the Black to White shunted together. You select either the White (partial winding) or Red (full winding) as the hot. The Black is always grounded.
But you've still basically got two coils of wire - the top half and the bottom half. It's exactly like a 3-wire HB where the "series link" is internal to the pickup with only one wire exposed to the world. And when you switch to that middle wire you've still got the top half of the coil hanging "upside down" from hot. I still believe that shunting one or the other will give better noise performance.
It's something I've been wondering about recently too - if, as ashcatlt points out, you wire a tapped pickup conventionally, you ground the inside end of the wire (black in this case) and then switch the output between the middle (white) and the outside end (red) depending on whether you want the tapped output or the full Malmsteen, but in the tapped position you will have the outer half hanging from hot and adding noise to the circuit.
ashcatlt's suggestion is to shunt the white/middle wire to ground instead and just take the output from the red/top. The problem with this approach is that you're using the outer/upper winds of the pickup when tapped, and if the tap is not exactly in the middle you may also be getting the weaker of the two sections of coil. For instance, if you have a 9k pickup tapped at 6k, doing it this way would give you the 3k length rather than the 6k length.
It occurs to me that an alternative approach would be to make the inside end of the wire (black) the output and the outside end (red) the ground, and then to route the middle (white) to ground whenever you want to tap the pickup. This way you always get the inner windings and you never have anything hanging hot. The one catch is that this also reverses the phase of the pickup, but if you wire all of your pickups the same way, they'll still be in phase with each other.
It also assumes that black is on the inside and red on the outside, but as the conventional way to wire a tapped pickup is to switch the output rather than switching the ground, that would suggest that the inner windings are between black and white, not white and red.
It's also possible this is a moot point, since the coil segment that hangs hot in the conventional setup is also phase reversed and thus might actually *reduce* noise by cancelling the noise coming from the lower/inner winding, no?
Thoughts?
