Easy mods that you can do yourself to unlock new tonal possibilities from your guitar.
How to wire a humbucker coil split.
This is a classic mod where you take a humbucker and rather than signal going through both coils, the signal is just going to go through one coil to give you something approximating a single coil sound.
It's never going to sound like a Strat single coil because the dimensions of the bobbin are different, the magnets are different...there's too many factors that are variable.
But if you have a humbucker and you want some different sounds, a little bit bright, a little more chimy, this is a great mod.
I'm going to show you this using a push pull pot, which is the most common way to do this. You'll see we have both traditional push pull part and a CTS pull pot because they're laid out slightly differently.
I'll show you the wiring for both.
Now, for this mod, you do need a humbucker that has four conductor wiring, so you have access to each end of each coil individually. And for this, I'm going to use the Johnny Foreigner color scheme. Wire colors are not standardized across the industry, everyone uses different colors for different connectors.
I'm going to show you ours. Okay, let's start at ground and work our way backwards. So the south start of the pickup, you're going to connect to ground. That's what you'd normally do in regular humbucker operation.
You're also going to connect the connector one on your push pull pot to ground.
South finish is going to connect to C1, which is the first common on the push pull pot. North finish is going to go also to C1, and then north start is going to go to your output.
Now your output in this case could be a switch. It could be an individual volume control for that pickup. It could be straight to the output jack, whatever. It's wherever you want the signal from that pickup to end up.
Let's talk through what's happening here.
So when the push pull part is in the down position, C1 is connected to two and you'll see that two has nothing connected to it. So what happens is the signal starts at the south start, goes all the way around the south bobbin out of the south finish, and connects to C1 where it also connects to the north finish all the way around the north bobbin and then to your north start, which goes to your output. So this is regular operation for a humbucker.
So when you pull up on a push pull part, what happens is that those common connectors, C1 and C2 are connected to the two upper connectors, one and three.
So C1 is connected to one, which means now that south start and south finish and north finish are all going to ground and only north start is going to the output.
So what that means is the south coil is completely eliminated because both ends of it are going to ground and then your north coil is working just on its own because the finish is going to ground and start is going to output. So there's a complete circuit there just with the north coil.
This is a really easy mod to unlock some great new tone out your humbucker. So get out your soldering iron. Have at it. Happy modding.
