Making coil splitting work

GreatGreen said:
However, if you turn a 500k pot down to around 7 or so, it becomes a 250k pot, so as long as you're careful and precise with the volume knob it can work, but it is one more thing you have to think about.
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That's not how voltage dividers work. The resistance to ground is still 500K no matter how you have the pot set. You'd need another resistance in parallel to lower the load on the pickup.

Edit: Joe beat me to it.
 
Joe Bfstplk said:
No. That is not how it works. The pot's total resistance, which is what loads the pickup(s), does not change with rotation of the pot. What happens is that the pot's wiper moves down the length of the resistive trace between hot and ground, making a variable voltage divider that includes series resistance between input and output, and shunt resistance across the output of the guitar....
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mr_fender said:
That's not how voltage dividers work. The resistance to ground is still 500K no matter how you have the pot set. You'd need another resistance in parallel to lower the load on the pickup.

Edit: Joe beat me to it.
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Ok guys that's interesting, but it does make me curious about something. When I put my multimeter on a 500k pot and turn it down, the resistance does in fact lower over the sweep of the pot until it eventually hits 0. I can measure a 500k audio taper pot on 10, and when I turn it down to around 7 or so, the resistance of that 500k pot does in fact measure around 250k. This decrease continues until the pot is turned down to 0.

Just so I understand, how is turning a 500k pot down until it reads 250k on a multimeter different from dialing a 250k pot to 10, if the end result measures the same on a multimeter?
 
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GreatGreen said:
Ok guys that's interesting, but it does make me curious about something. When I put my multimeter on a 500k pot and turn it down, the resistance does in fact lower over the sweep of the pot until it eventually hits 0. I can measure a 500k audio taper pot on 10, and when I turn it down to around 7 or so, the resistance of that 500k pot does in fact measure around 250k. This decrease continues until the pot is turned down to 0.

Just so I understand, how is turning a 500k pot down until it reads 250k on a multimeter different from dialing a 250k pot to 10, if the end result measures the same on a multimeter?
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Turning the 500k pot down is altering the signal by shunting part of it to ground. With the 250k pot at 10, for all intents and purposes, none of the signal has been shunted to ground.
 
GreatGreen said:
Ok guys that's interesting, but it does make me curious about something. When I put my multimeter on a 500k pot and turn it down, the resistance does in fact lower over the sweep of the pot until it eventually hits 0. I can measure a 500k audio taper pot on 10, and when I turn it down to around 7 or so, the resistance of that 500k pot does in fact measure around 250k. This decrease continues until the pot is turned down to 0.

Just so I understand, how is turning a 500k pot down until it reads 250k on a multimeter different from dialing a 250k pot to 10, if the end result measures the same on a multimeter?
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You are reading between wiper and ground.

The total resistance of the pot from end to end, which is what the pickup sees as its load (barring any other controls or existing in the circuit), does not change with the turning of the knob....
 
You know what... you guys were right. I was measuring and thinking in terms of the spin-a-split mod. Doh! Volume pots work differently than that. :)

It's been a couple years since I dove down the rabbit hole of pickup and pot wiring. Might have to revisit it.
 
Many PRS guitars have a treble bleed on their volume pot which isn't only keeping the highs in balance when rolling the volume pot back, they even pronounce the highs. Now what is that good for?
In humbucker mode dial back the volume pot down sone to 4 or 5 and have a brighter humbucker tone because the treble bleed keeps the highs unaffected by the pot.
Now when you split the HB turn up the volume pot again to get that split sound as loud as the humbucker and to also kill the influence of the treble bleed, so the splitted HB isn't thin in comparison.
That works beautifully with CE24's with 85/15s, but also with some earlier stuff.
 
Dunconia said:
Does anyone know how to actually make a split coil sound good? I would love to get some good single coil sounds out of a split humbucker but it ALWAYS sounds paper thin and lifeless. I'm thinking part of this is because of the volume drop. Perhaps, it needs some type of eq, filtering, boost or something? Is anyone making good use of a filter block or anything for this?
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You can do a pseudo split coil emulation by using the TMA block. First make a tone match of a guitar with single coils, then use a humbucker equipped guitar fo finalize the TMA block and use it as your first block in your chain to make your HB sound like a SC. Your aslo able to make up for volume losses by boosting the level of the TMA block and additionally you can convert the TMA block to a CAB block and add additonal colouration to the emulation. I've done this and it sounds pretty convincing.
 
Jamme1961 said:
I use his one https://www.premierguitar.com/amp/spin-a-split-wiring-2657850329
I also like parallel wiring on humbucers- the hotter the humbucker the better the split sound IMHO
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One thing to note about the spin-a-split mod. I'd highly recommend the pot you use to be a no-load pot so when you turn it to 10, the pot is truly removed from the circuit and the guitar no longer sees the load of the pot. If you don't do that, the pot stays in the circuit and loads the humbucker down even on 10, making it darker than it needs to be.

Also, it's easier than you think to convert your own pots to no-load. There are a few youtube tutorials about how to do it.
 
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