At "full humbucker" mode, the entire winding of the humbucker is used. Plenty of humbucker companies offer a "coil tapping" option which is where they tap into the entire humbucker with another wire somewhere in the middle of the winding. There is a technical difference between "coil tap" and "coil split."Ī "coil tap" is what I described above where the wire is "tapped into" the middle of the winding.Ī "coil split" is when one of the coils in the humbucker is removed from the circuit entirely, making the pickup into a true single coil. No longer tinny it has all the warmth of a strat. I did THIS on my Parker PM20 except, I used it to add a small amount of signal from the Neck PU when the bridge is tapped and it is AWESOME. This enables you to dial in the amount of the ‘dumped’ coil you want to hear. ****Alternately, the late Brit luthier Sid Poole showed us a good one, using a 4.7k ohm variable resistor (sub-miniature fully enclosed carbon preset potentiometers from Maplins, 49p each) mounted onto the control cavity backplate. PRS uses a 2.2k ohm resistor on the neck pickup and a 8.8k ohm resistor on the bridge pickup. It allows some of the other coil through. This mod, “doesn’t completely cancel the slug coil,” explains Smith, “it sort of three-quarters coil cancels. You simply add, in series, a resistor between the pickup ‘tap’ wire and ground. PRS recently started using quite an old idea (first suggested to us by guitar/amp technician Brinsley Schwarz). It can result in a rather thin single-coil tone. The majority simply dump one of the humbucker’s coils to ground, leaving just one working. The optimal solution: use a variable resistor mini-potentiometer for each pickup to be split, so you can dial in to preference the split sound based on the three variables above (height, position/location, design).Loads of humbucker-equipped electric guitars have coil-split switching options. It's a matter of tuning the resistor to the pickup design, location/position on the body and height, which brings us toģ. So the higher the resistor, the more of the grounded coil gets retained in the signal, higher output, less hum, but also less bright. Different pickups will prefer different resistor values, so your results in retaining the original resistors will be hit or miss. If you retain the resistors, you should be able to swap out pickups and retain the benefits of the "partial split." That said,Ģ. I don't think anyone answered this, so here goes:ġ. If I can ever justify a 3rd electric, that will probably be it! But I think the knob could be really useful when used with the treble tone knob to achieve a wide range of tones. Some people also do this circuit with a fixed bass cut switch vs a passive bass tone knob. I really like the sound of de-bassed humbuckers but haven't had a chance to compare. I think my ideal hollowbody would be something like a PRS SE Hollowbody II with a 3 knob passive VTB circuit and 85/15 or 58/15 pickups. If anyone has read this far, I wonder how you like a bass cut circuit compared to the "optimized resistor-tuned coil split." For example, why/why not make reverb footswitchable? It all implies certain usage parameters and intentions, which are helpful to know about. It would be incredibly fascinating and useful. Every guitar, for example, I think, should have at least a QR code linking to a site with a PDF that has a thorough designer's brief on every feature and appointment, explaining why they made it the way they did. To be fair, however, I also find documentation on this stuff to be lacking. How many times does this happen to poorly-understood consumer technologies? I regularly read negative Amazon reviews, for example, where it is obvious the reviewer has NO idea how to correctly use the device they are complaining about. So adding yet another "adjustment parameter" on top of that might be poorly received, especially if something gets put out of adjustment, the guitar could be accused of being defective and subjected to a labor-intensive diagnostic process, or worse yet, perceived as a bad guitar. Not to mention that most guitarists these days don't seem to appreciate or know how to use their volume and tone knobs (all this talk about pickup "output balancing" ignores the fact that you can dial in your rig for your weakest tone, eg coil split or a strat's #2/#4 positions, eg with volume up and tone backed off, and then also sound great when you switch to your stronger sounds, with additional "boost" and "bright" on tap as needed), let alone how to (or that you can and even should) fine-tune pickup height and string balance. Another electrical connection, another mechanical point of failure, and perhaps additional pennies in parts and minutes of labor per instrument. I am surprised that more manufacturers don't do this, although I suppose I can see why.
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