GreatGreen
Power User
---- I posted this on another forum and it got a decent response, so I thought I'd share it here with you guys as well. ----
Hey guys, a couple of months ago I bought a Les Paul and decided to change the pickups. I figured that while I'm changing the pickups, I might as well look into making the guitar do exactly what I want, so as usual I went way too far down the rabbit hole and learned basically everything I could about pickup wiring, and came up with this weird configuration, which I love.
To some of you, this may be sacrilege but it suits me perfectly.
Here's how it works:
For reference, the knobs are labeled in blue and oriented as if you are looking at the guitar sitting in your lap.
1. Master volume for both pickups. Yes, both pickups. On a Les Paul. Yep.
2. Bridge Tone. Push-Pull for coil split. (the diagram shows the push-pull element as separated from the tone pot but I just drew it like that for clarity)
3. Humbucker / Single Coil blend pot for Neck pickup. Blends between full humbucking and full single coil mode. At 0, the inner coil is off leaving only the outer screw coil active.
4. Neck Tone.
The blend knob is obviously the most noteworthy thing about this setup, so that's what I'll talk about. It effectively blends the pickup between humbucker and single coil modes by simply acting as a volume knob for only the inner coil, which sounds great and works exactly like you'd think it would. As you dial the knob down, you slowly add more chime and shimmer to the pickup until you end up somewhere in strat/tele territory. I converted the pot into a no-load pot as well, so the pot itself is actually true-bypassed out of the signal path in humbucking mode. I wired the pot to dial out the inner slug coil so that single coil mode means the outer, screw coil is activated. This coil sounds more "necky" and round to me so the pickup can get particularly Strat-like when fully coil split.
The official name of the mod if you want to Google it is called “the spin-a-split mod” and uses a 50K pot. Not a typo, that's '50K' and not '500K' which might seem weird but that's the way they work best. If you use a normal 500K pot, you don't get any coil blend happening until the last tiny bit of sweep.
I'd highly suggest trying this if you can. I'll never go without one again if I can help it. It really does give you the best of both worlds and everything in between if you want. It's easy to get the sound of a humbucker with just a bit more chime on top, or a single coil with just a bit more body than normal. It's great. Totally worth sacrificing the extra volume control for, which I didn't like anyway because I'd always swap to a pickup with its volume at 0 and lose my sound for a second, which was distracting.
Anybody else try this? What did you think?
Hey guys, a couple of months ago I bought a Les Paul and decided to change the pickups. I figured that while I'm changing the pickups, I might as well look into making the guitar do exactly what I want, so as usual I went way too far down the rabbit hole and learned basically everything I could about pickup wiring, and came up with this weird configuration, which I love.
To some of you, this may be sacrilege but it suits me perfectly.
Here's how it works:
For reference, the knobs are labeled in blue and oriented as if you are looking at the guitar sitting in your lap.
1. Master volume for both pickups. Yes, both pickups. On a Les Paul. Yep.
2. Bridge Tone. Push-Pull for coil split. (the diagram shows the push-pull element as separated from the tone pot but I just drew it like that for clarity)
3. Humbucker / Single Coil blend pot for Neck pickup. Blends between full humbucking and full single coil mode. At 0, the inner coil is off leaving only the outer screw coil active.
4. Neck Tone.
The blend knob is obviously the most noteworthy thing about this setup, so that's what I'll talk about. It effectively blends the pickup between humbucker and single coil modes by simply acting as a volume knob for only the inner coil, which sounds great and works exactly like you'd think it would. As you dial the knob down, you slowly add more chime and shimmer to the pickup until you end up somewhere in strat/tele territory. I converted the pot into a no-load pot as well, so the pot itself is actually true-bypassed out of the signal path in humbucking mode. I wired the pot to dial out the inner slug coil so that single coil mode means the outer, screw coil is activated. This coil sounds more "necky" and round to me so the pickup can get particularly Strat-like when fully coil split.
The official name of the mod if you want to Google it is called “the spin-a-split mod” and uses a 50K pot. Not a typo, that's '50K' and not '500K' which might seem weird but that's the way they work best. If you use a normal 500K pot, you don't get any coil blend happening until the last tiny bit of sweep.
I'd highly suggest trying this if you can. I'll never go without one again if I can help it. It really does give you the best of both worlds and everything in between if you want. It's easy to get the sound of a humbucker with just a bit more chime on top, or a single coil with just a bit more body than normal. It's great. Totally worth sacrificing the extra volume control for, which I didn't like anyway because I'd always swap to a pickup with its volume at 0 and lose my sound for a second, which was distracting.
Anybody else try this? What did you think?