Ya little pikers have clearly never met the Almighty Lawrence L500XL from Bill Lawrence.
http://wildepickups.com/Wilde_Bill_s_Twin_Blades.html
The biggest problem with splitting most pickups is that you're getting all the magnetic pull of both coils, and only the juice from one. But Lawrence was the first guy to figure out some ways of varying the inductance levels to disarm magnetic pull as an important element. The L500XL is just about like having two good, standard Telecaster bridge pickups side by side. Not two overwound ones, but more power and bandwidth range than any two Strat pickups ever. Except you get all the juice and none of the magnetic artifacts.
When I say he's the first, I do believe the Lace pickups are in there, he likes the Alumitone and those things are great on bass & steel guitar, you can buy Fender pickups (designed by Lawrence) for more money if you want, there are at least half-a-dozen companies sniffin' up the right tree - but except for Duncan's blatant ripoff the "Dimebucker", it ain't DiMarzio, Duncan, Rio Grande etc. Every time I try one, I just have to go back and fix it with a L500. The biggest "problem" with them is that you do have to arrange your amp and stompies to deal with the power, when you put in a pickup that's pushing 2-3 times the signal and a much clearer treble level into your carefully-arranged overdrive structure, it will be "harsh." And if you've got a dragon in your pocket, you can't put a pink ribbon around it's neck and call it "pootie-tat."
Lawrence doesn't care about patents, which is kind of an interesting approach - rightfully, he ought to be getting a few cents off of every single guitar made that splits coils and recombines ones from different pickups with switching, which would be a quite a nice pile of pennies by now. Leo Fender was the same way, he couldn't believe anybody would rather spend their time in courtrooms when they could be playing with wires in their lab. But it does have the effect of "devaluing" their contributions, at least among us greedy folk who assign a set dollar value to everything and couldn't possibly understand otherwise.
The only thing you can do to a regular humbucker is a series/parallel switch, but every time I buy one I just have to replace it with a real PU, i.e. Lawrence. Even the lower power "L" and "C" models split quite nicely, because the fundamental problem is fixed. And you can call him up and talk to him, though his wife tries to keep him off the phone, and if you can't speak German and have about five engineering degrees, you'll be hopelessly confused in seconds.
