Stacked SC recommendation

johnnyj

Junior Member
Messages
57
hi guys,

i use in my new strat the eric johnson fender sc set. neck and middle are really cool but i dislike the bridge pickup. my idea is now to replace it with a stacked singlecoil to have a bit more beefy crunch sound in the lead. but i would like to have in the middle/bridge position a hum free setup where i only use the main magnet of the stacked pickup. i could imagine testing a virtual solo or injector or other pickups like that but i fear that i will decide for one that will be out of phase with the rwrp middle sc when using in split mode.

did anybody have experience with a similar setup? are all pickups by a vendor wired in same magnetic polarity? eg you could always combine a fender rwrp mid with a fender noisless or always or never with a dimarzio stack? is there a compatability list between pickup manufactureres?

thanks
j.
 
I’m not sure how to wire it for what you want but the Seymour Duncan hot stack plus strat sounds mighty good to my ears.
 
Do you mean that in the middle/bridge position you want to use just one coil of the stacked bridge humbucker rather than its magnet, that would be straightforward to do and if there is a phase issue all that happens is for that position only you swap the hot and cold wires of one of the pickups e.g. the bridge to solve the phase (Magnet polarity is another thing of course)

There is no comprehensive compatibility list for all manufacturers products that I am aware of.
 
Couple things, does it have to be noiseless? I have found I get a lot more out of my strat's if I wire tone 2 to be for the bridge pickup so I can roll off the harshness. It does wonders for the sound.

Building on that the DiMarzio FS-1 is a great bridge pickup because its wound pretty hot and its not bright. It works really well in the edge signature strat.

If you have to have noiseless, then the DiMarzio Area series pickups are by far my favorite, the same tech is used for the Injector pickups and on paper the injector is not as bright as the rest of the area line of pickups.

For magnet compatibility, Fender pickups are South UP for Neck/Bridge and North UP for RWRP. You would want to email DiMarzio to confirm the "main magnet" of the Area/Injector is also South UP to be magnetically correct for your applications. You will also need to special order it with the tap SPLIT wires full length because they are clipped and soldered by default.

Hope this helps.
 
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I do something similar with an Area 67 in the middle position, and and Duncan STK-S7 in the bridge. Both pickups are coil-split when the selector is in position 2, (Bridge + Middle in parallel). It cancels hum because the Duncan STK-S7 has North magnetic polarity, while Dimarzio Area has South magnetic polarity. However the electrical phase is different between the two brands so the wiring connections needs to be 'reversed' for one of the pickups. The grounding connection of the Duncan stack cannot be reversed so I had to reverse the wiring connections of the Dimarzio Area in this case.

So there are two points:
1) A wiring scheme that requires both phase reversal and coil split wiring means you need to fully understand the wiring for your pickups whether they are 4-Conductor like Dimarzio Area, or 3-Conductor in the case of Duncan 'stack plus' series.
2) Magnetic polarity is typically inconsistent between different pickups. Very often different series / generations of pickups from the same maker will have different magnetic polarity and / or phase. Although there are some conventions, you need to physically check the magnetic phase of the pickups you have.
 
I'd replace all three pickups with Dimarzio Area 61 at the bridge, Area 58 middle, and Area 67 neck, and wire them up normally.
Use a 500k volume pot (which is what EJ does), and wire one 250k tone control to the bridge pickup (not the middle) and a
no-load 250k tone control to the neck pickup.
 
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