Rewired My Tele Deluxe with Split Coils (Not Coil Split HBs)
Posted: Mon Jan 07, 2013 5:20 am
So, i have been working on pickup designs for a little while and, while i can't make them myself (yet, anyway. I don't have the equipment), I have really been getting nice results from a type of pickup called split coils that I had a great pickup winder named Travis Morris make for me. These are not the same thing as humbuckers with one coil turned off but are more like G+L Z-Coils or P-Bass pickups except that they are in a standard Humbucker casing so they easily retrofit into a guitar routed for standard HBs.
Basically, the point of this (rather than a single coil package) is that doing two reverse wound reverse polarity coils in a line like that ends up creating a weak or dead spot between the G and D string because the magnetic fields oppose there directly. These are offset much like the coils in a P-Bass pickup or the Z-coil. There's a good reason Leo Fender offset those coils. It eliminates any dead spot because any opposition is not directly between two strings but spread out across a diagonal line.
Anyway, the obvious point is you have a noiseless pickup that uses traditional alnico poles and sounds like a nice single coil. However, there are a lot of interesting things you can do with these since they are 4-conductor pickups. Unlike a standard humbucker, each coil does not cover all the strings. There is a bass coil and a treble coil in each pickup so you can do things like turn off half the strings or take half the signal from the neck pickup and the other half from the bridge pickup. So, I came up with a wiring scheme that uses a pretty standard single tone and single volume (though the tone control is much milder and can be bypassed via the S1 switch I mounted it on) and your usual 3-way tele deluxe pickup selector. It also has, however, two other 2-position switches in place of the two other knobs. One of them turns off half of each pickup. This is called the Split Switch. The other one crosses the signals between the pickups in series, giving either a wider or narrower frequency spectrum.
I made a selection matrix to illustrate the resulting four modes of opperation:
Pretty awesome! Doesn't hurt that the neck is a beautiful warmoth all rosewood neck someone gave me to see what I'd do with it so the guitar sounds great to begin with but man. So many cool things to be done. For example, I like tuning the bottom three strings to an open chord like D or something, turning off the treble pickup and then playing on the high e and b strings. What happens is the notes you play aren't picked up directly but rather have to resonate through the three "live" strings giving a tuned sitar/reverb sort of effect with indirect pick attack.
Or slitting the signal lets you do, say, half a lead on the bridge pickup and then you can move to the smoother neck lead sound on the high notes without changing anything.
Basically, the point of this (rather than a single coil package) is that doing two reverse wound reverse polarity coils in a line like that ends up creating a weak or dead spot between the G and D string because the magnetic fields oppose there directly. These are offset much like the coils in a P-Bass pickup or the Z-coil. There's a good reason Leo Fender offset those coils. It eliminates any dead spot because any opposition is not directly between two strings but spread out across a diagonal line.
Anyway, the obvious point is you have a noiseless pickup that uses traditional alnico poles and sounds like a nice single coil. However, there are a lot of interesting things you can do with these since they are 4-conductor pickups. Unlike a standard humbucker, each coil does not cover all the strings. There is a bass coil and a treble coil in each pickup so you can do things like turn off half the strings or take half the signal from the neck pickup and the other half from the bridge pickup. So, I came up with a wiring scheme that uses a pretty standard single tone and single volume (though the tone control is much milder and can be bypassed via the S1 switch I mounted it on) and your usual 3-way tele deluxe pickup selector. It also has, however, two other 2-position switches in place of the two other knobs. One of them turns off half of each pickup. This is called the Split Switch. The other one crosses the signals between the pickups in series, giving either a wider or narrower frequency spectrum.
I made a selection matrix to illustrate the resulting four modes of opperation:
Pretty awesome! Doesn't hurt that the neck is a beautiful warmoth all rosewood neck someone gave me to see what I'd do with it so the guitar sounds great to begin with but man. So many cool things to be done. For example, I like tuning the bottom three strings to an open chord like D or something, turning off the treble pickup and then playing on the high e and b strings. What happens is the notes you play aren't picked up directly but rather have to resonate through the three "live" strings giving a tuned sitar/reverb sort of effect with indirect pick attack.
Or slitting the signal lets you do, say, half a lead on the bridge pickup and then you can move to the smoother neck lead sound on the high notes without changing anything.