GFS wiring questions

zebra

Senior Member
Messages
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I've got two GFS humbuckers (Retrotron Hot Nashville and VEH), and the wiring has me a little confused.

When I think of 4 conductor pickups, I think of them as having five wires - two north, two south, and a ground.  The instructions for these pickups describes them as being "4 conductor" and provides the following description:

White = Coil Tap
Red = Signal+
Black = Ground
Copper = Pickup Shield Ground

There's so much confusion between 'coil tap' and 'coil split' I had trouble finding a good answer online, and all the diagrams seem to have five wires...So what do I make of this?

Can these pickups be wired to a five-way switch for a variety of coil combinations, or should I just treat them like 2-conductor humbuckers, and wire them to a three-way for a B/B&N series/N arrangement?

Sorry if this seems obvious - I know I need to up my game on wiring theory!

Thanks for any help you can offer!
 
Sorry I am not familiar with those pickups.

You could check what the wires are doing.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UfxQBhqen8
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Coil tap is where there is a hot tap in the wind so that you have fewer winds than when having no coil tap.

You can't really split a coil unless you do not want it to work.

Two coils can be split so that only one coil of a humbucker is used.

You could also contact GFS and ask them what they think it does. If pickup makers start using incorrect terms for things that would be not good.
 
My (older) GFS HB's are like this:

Green = Hot
Red + White = Solder Together
Black = Ground
Bare = Ground

My guess - if yours are as you state - is that coil #1 is red+/white- and coil #2 is white+/black-. IOW they have connected the two coils together internally and just given you a single (white) lead for that. If you have a meter you should be able to test it easily to verify.

Tapping and splitting is often confused so you should never assume the person using "tap" knows the difference, or they might even be knowingly misusing the term in a way that's commonly misunderstood. HB's with taps exist but are very, very rare and it would be made clear that they were tapped and not just standard splittable HB's.
 
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