GFS True Coil Pickup

Neo Fender

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Guess this also qualifies as a Wiring Q but anyway…

Bought a pair of humbuckers and a True Coil (Single Coil) pickup from GFS to go into a Kramer Striker that’s setup for H/S/H pickups.  My plan is to split the humbuckers with a push/pull tone pot/switch.

The “Single Coil” pickup is a four wire design.  I doubt that it is coil tapped.  My guess is that the second pair of wires is for the slug or dummy coil.  Should I connect two of the wires, then wire this pickup like a regular (two wire) pickup?  If I try to wire this pickup to be splitable, I’m not sure what this would accomplish or sound like.

If the above assumption is correct, which two wires should be connected? GFS uses Seymour Duncan wiring color code.  For their humbuckers they show white (north end) connected to red (south end) with black (north start) to ground and green (south start) to positive.

Their single coils show white to positive, black to ground.

Should I just see which of the two combinations gives the highest DC resistance?

I will also check to see what GFS has to say but I wanted to tap into the knowledge here.

Thanks.
 
On the humbuckers black is hot and goes on your 5 position blade switch, green is ground and goes on the ground (such as the back of a pot). If you have a fifth, not covered cable (maybe already stuck together with the green one it is ground as well).
White and red are tied together, and put on the push pull. In one position of the push pull you have to get it connect with ground, whioe on the other it doesn,t. The humbuckers will be n series that way or songlecoil mode.
You need seperate lugs on the push pull for the hridge and the neck humbuckers.
The singlecoil is connected to the bladeswitch with the white one, and the black one is ground.

If sou want to get the neck sc with the middle on workng (like normal 2/4 position of a strat) you have to make sure that the two used coils have opposite polarity. I used a rwrp middle sc to achieve that.

And since a pucture says more than lots of words - there yo go

http://www.seymourduncan.com/support/wiring-diagrams/schematics.php?schematic=HSH_1v_5w_pushpull

The middle ne has 4 conducters as well? Then I guess you hardwire the red and the white together and use black as hot and green as ground
 
Secret Agent Potato is correct. I'm not sure why they bring all 4 connections out - you 'd never want to split that pickup. The second coil is purely for bucking hum; there'd be no reason to eliminate it or try to use it as a pickup.

Dimarzio and SD both do it, too. I made the mistake of trying to take advantage of that once years ago. Huge waste of time.
 
I second that, my strat has 3 stacked singlecoils with a master split - and there is hardly any difference split or not... Hence the humming
 
Actually, there very much is a point to having the wires for a dummy coil available. Although dummy coils mostly just take off a little hum and are often made so that wiring them in what appears to be series actually is parallel wiring, there still will be a small loss in output, mostly noticable in higher frequencies. This is due to there simply being more wire in the circuit and the change in impedance.
It may be such a small difference that you do not notice it when playing whatever style of music you play at whatever volumes you play at, but for another person playing a different style of music or at a different volume, they may notice. Or perhaps that other person just happens to be Eric Johnson or Prince and is going to notice regardless.

So you have the extra wires so you can take the dummy coil out of the circuit if you wish, to retain a little more output at the higher frequencies at the cost of bringing back hum. You could also use those wires to wire the coils actually in series (again, the wire colours will have been flipped so what appears to be in series at first is actually parallel wiring), which will give you a bump in output and a little less treble but may no longer be hum-cancelling, depending on exactly how the pickup was made (if they used the method SD use for their hum-cancelling Tele pickups, it will begin to hum; if they copied what SD do for their Strat pickups, it should remain hum-cancelling).

So, to wire these pickups for their primary function—a hum-cancelling single coil tone—you wire them up the way any other GFS humbucker would be wired with the coils in series. That's red & white as your series link, black is your hot and the green & bare are your ground wires, assuming their 'true coils' follow the same wire colour code as their other humbucker models.
 
I agree that there are those who would rather the bucking coil not be there (or at least be switchable) for tonal purposes. But, I suspect that anyone who's that particular (the Eric Johnsons of this world) probably wouldn't use those pickups in the first place. They're just not optimized for that application. They're designed to shut up and be quiet. I've used a lot of "noiseless" single coils, and the GFS True Coils sound the best to me. If they don't go far enough, then one would need to go to a real single coil and tolerate the wall of noise they produce.

The True Coils aren't silent; they still hum. But, it's so far reduced as to be acceptable Wanna play some SRV or Eric Clapton? That's the way to do it.
 
Even in a high gain application, I've found what little hum that they do inject to be very neglegable, and the tiny bit of noise gate that I do use takes care of it.

The Neo's are quite quiet, and it works well for my tele, but I am really digging the Tru Coil 10K as a neck pickup to complement my Dimarzio Evolution in the bridge of my TFS6.  The Tru Coil makes for great cleans, but it also is really nice to solo on, lots of detail, with just enough output to keep up with the Evolution.  The "Bloom" of the way the not blossoms is nice too, kind of like a wah pedal that starts our at half & then sweeps up, rather than starting and the muddiest part of the bottom & then moving up.  It just has a really nice clarity to it that I enjoy.
 
Another reason you might want to split a stack like that is, you could combine that main coil with one coil from a regular humbucker and still have a hum-cancelling combination.

I've got the Seymour Duncan Stack Plus pickups in my main strat, and they provide one wire from the series link for you to ground to get that coil. One theory is that you can split them in the 2 and 4 positions and if you eliminate the bottom coils you have the same as a Strat with a regular RWRP middle pickup, but both true single coils. Apparently it gives better quack. I wired a couple in with a switch so I could test the theory - have neck and middle or bridge and middle active, and then switch whether or not they were split. No difference whatsoever. So in my Strat, they're never split. Wiring exactly as complex as it needs to be - no more, and no less.
 
^That too.

Cagey said:
But, I suspect that anyone who's that particular (the Eric Johnsons of this world) probably wouldn't use those pickups in the first place.
Eh, the reason I mentioned Prince alongside him, other than Prince being notoriously picky about what goes into his recordings and what gear he uses, is he actually has uses various 'noiseless' single coils and also had dummy coils installed in his guitar, with switching for precisely this purpose. I believe Jeff Beck did, for a while, too.
 
I've heard about installing dummies separate from the mains. I think Suhr has a trick they do that way. But, I haven't tried it yet. One of these days...
 
The totally separate dummy coils first showed up on Alembics, I believe. They has a little low thing in between the two pickups? But they also pioneered powered low-impedance ones just prior to EMG letting the peasants have a shot at it. There are people who have put dummys under the pickguards of strattish and telesque guitars too. Seems like you might a pretty strong one to be effective that far from the strings, unless - come to think of it, the strings don't have much to do with it, do they?  :icon_scratch: Mighty skinny to be much of an antenna.
 
Your basic options are:

passive dummy in parallel
passive dummy in series
active dummy in parallel
active dummy in series

Active dummy in series is covered by a patent, despite the fact that obvious to one skilled in the art is not the same thing as "obvious to a moron in a civil service job with a rubber stamp machine set up so he can fill out his college sports brackets at the water cooler while stamping patent applications."
 
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