Dummy coil

[Heft]

Hey,
I wan't to put a dummy coil in a telecaster (essential making it an esquire.) If I was to pull the poles out of a single coil pick up do I need to worry about the quality of the pickup? Can I just get the cheapest pickup off amazon for the dummy coil?
Heft!

 

[supertruper1988]

On vintage style construction with fibber bobbins you can break the inner windings of the coil so I would look for something like an old Mexico standard pickup with the steel poles and ceramic magnets glued to the back. Cheap Squier pickups are that way too. Then you can just pop the magnets off and push out the poles.

I mention these specifically because they have plastic bobbins that typically have the magnets in a tube.

 

[Strat Avenger]

'Seems kind'a silly, but to each his own.

 

[u.9]

So long as the pole pieces haven't become magnetized, you should be able to just remove the magnets and leave the wires disconnected. Electrically, all that would happen then is your string vibration would induce a voltage in the coil that would go nowhere, but there would be no magnetic force pulling on the strings [edit: there would be no inductance since there is no magnet generating a field which the strings could influence to create voltage in the coil; the coil would still act as an antenna as coils do but the effect would not be noticable since the pickup is not electrically connected to the rest of the circuit]. Any cheap pup would do. Or, you could get creative and find something interesting to stuff into the route!

 

[lambo823]

Let's say you have a Strat, or any other guitar with single-coil pickups. If you blend two of the pickups, and they're wound in opposite directions, they will cancel out the background hum. However, you normally can't achieve this hum cancellation while using a single pickup.

A dummy coil is a pickup coil without a magnet. As such, it can't pick up the vibrations of the strings, but it can pick up background noise. If you install one in your guitar (often attached to the vibrato cover plate, in the back of the body), you can now cancel out the background hum while using any individual pickup. Since it doesn't pick up the vibrations of the strings, it has no effect on the tone of the guitar; it just reduces the noise.

 

[Strat Avenger]

Let's say you have a Strat, or any other guitar with single-coil pickups. If you blend two of the pickups, and they're wound in opposite directions, they will cancel out the background hum. However, you normally can't achieve this hum cancellation while using a single pickup.

A dummy coil is a pickup coil without a magnet. As such, it can't pick up the vibrations of the strings, but it can pick up background noise. If you install one in your guitar (often attached to the vibrato cover plate, in the back of the body), you can now cancel out the background hum while using any individual pickup. Since it doesn't pick up the vibrations of the strings, it has no effect on the tone of the guitar; it just reduces the noise.

Not true that it has no effect on the tone of the guitar. When it's in the circuit, there is a reduction in high frequencies just like stacked humbuckers. Suhr offers this feature, and does Wilkinson guitars.
Thomas Blug has it in his signature Wilkinson Strat. It has a switch that can put it in or out of the circuit.

Personally, I would rather use Dimarzio Area 61 and Area 67 pickups with 500k volume control (and no-load Tone controls) than incorporate a contraption like a dummy coil.