This month I am getting back to a fun tech mod you will find
very useful and an easy way to upgrade most any guitar that doesn't
already support humbucking to single coil, coil tapping functions.
My intent was to make this as simple as possible while using materials
that can be found locally probably no matter where you live. I
have been tinkering with this "Ibanez DC10" budget fiddle
that you have seen in some of the earlier articles. It's a very
simple straight forward instrument that needed some help in a
few areas to make it more user friendly. If I were stranded on
a desert island with a guitar and amp I would have to have humbuckers
but at the same time I love the single coil sounds for the clean
tones and find I am satisfied with the single coil tones we can
get out of humbucking pickups.
Many budget fiddles strip back all the upgraded options to keep
their cost down but with a little TLC we can tweak some of these
details easily and as close to free as we can get. So this month
I wanted to address how to convert a 2 wire pickup (hot and ground)
to a three wire, allowing us to take advantage of a coil tap function
that most all will find to be very useful.
A humbuckers construction is pretty simple in design. There are
so many varying wire color codes, 2 wire, 3 wire and 4 wire pickups
that it can get confusing when mixing and matching various manufactures
pups and problems you will encounter. Each coil requires two wires
being the start and end of the coil wind also known as the + or
-. Also each coil is charged + or via the magnet. The pickup
we are modifying is in its simplest form with a 2 wire connection,
also how many Gibson or other OEM replacement pickups are found.
Please read through completely before attempting this on your
own.
You will find we have two layers of tape protecting the coils;
the first wrapped around both coils and then another wrapped around
each coil individually. For our purposes we will only need to
remove the outer wrap and not the individuals. First we need to
remove the tape so we can get to the wires we need. Find the overlap
in the outer tape and carefully peel it back; pulling at a 180
verse a 90 will help avoid pulling on the coil windings.
Once exposed we find the hot + wire connected to white wire of
coil #1, then two black wires (one from each coil) wrapped and
soldered together which connects coil #1 to #2 (this will be our
coil tap feed) and last we have the ground output wire which is
soldered to the base along with the ground wire from coil #2.
Now that the wires are exposed and identified we need to remove
the 4 coil screws with a screwdriver so we can do our thing. Once
removed unsolder the original pup wire leaving the pup as shown
below. With screw in pole pieces this will need to be backed out
of the base plate.
Here we have it disassembled with the usual suspects visible being:
the coil spacers, magnet and pole pieces, base plate and the new
wire we are going to use for the mod. Be careful when pulling
the pickup apart which may be sealed with wax, magnets can pop
off and if we loose proper orientation you might re-assemble it
backwards and cause one pickup to be out of phase with the other,
if this happens just rotate the magnet into its opposite polarity
direction.
I went down to the local Radio Shack and picked up a 50ft roll
of audio cable, 2 (stranded) conductors plus a shield, 24AWG part
# 278-513. More wire than I will need for a long time but at least
it was chump change for $7.99.
In this particular mod the wire I'm using is just as thick as
the coil spacers so I removed one of the two spacers and fed my
new wire into the wire guide hole, soldered the ground to the
base plate and prepared my new other wires for connecting to the
coils.
Next I screwed the pickup back together and connected the leads,
the white of the new wire connects to the same wire hot lead as
original, my new blue wire connects to both of the wires that
tied the two coils together (this becomes our coil tap wire),
last I re-solder the original #2 coil (black ground wire) to the
base plate. Apply small 2 wire wraps or pieces of heat shrink
over the hot wire and the new coil tap wires.
You probably wont be able to reuse the original tape so in my
case I just grabbed some black electrical tape and using a razor
blade sliced it to a width equal to that of the pickups side profile
height and wrapped 1-1/2 turns around the pup, making sure the
heat shrunk wires are nicely stowed away to keep it from bulging.
For final wiring to a coil tap switch Stay Tuned to next month
and we conquer what obstacles you may encounter and the options
we can address. We could have upgraded this to a 4 conductor plus
a shield connection for more wiring options but that can yield
some other headaches and more than I can fit into one article
so I felt this would be as Guitar 101 as I could get. For the
daring www.stewmac.com and sells a 4 conductor wire for such operations
or I have enough of either the 2 or 4 wire that I could supply
you with enough to do the job so were not all sitting on a life
times supply of pup wire. See www.dimarzio.com
or www.seymourduncan.com
or www.stewmac.com
for more wiring diagrams.
Any questions or comments visit www.finetunedinstruments.com
or www.meangene.org
or email me at info311@verizon.net
Fine Tuned Instruments LLC, home of Gene Baker built instruments.
