PBG 4 wire pups

The wiring for some PBG Pickups is sometimes causing confusion so I thought I would create a thread on this topic.

The problem is associated with the 4-wire Humbuckers sometimes being used instead of the 2-wire variety. The other issue is that there is not a "standard" for the colours of the wires from the manufacturers.

With the 4-wire pup shown below:

the Red wire is "hot",
the black is the "ground/Earth" which is soldered to the bare Shielding wire,
and the green and white wires (which are soldered together) link the two coils in the humbucker. These are normally taped to prevent them shorting on the other components.

Great idea! That's actually all you need to know if you are attaching PB supplied pickups. If they come two "colored" wires soldered together that's always the middle. If there is a wire soldered to the silver shielding wire that's always the ground (or finish), so by process of elimination the other wire must be the "hot" or start wire.

I think with a lot of the PB kits you get two different colors of hot. YMMV, but sometimes one is red and the other is yellow. The "hotter" the two will be the bridge pickup and other will be the neck pickup. You can test to see which is hotter with a multimeter by checking DC resistance (ohms) between the "hot" wire and the "ground/earth" wire. The one with the bigger number is the hotter pickup.*

Here's a video that I use on mapping a humbucker:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YJttUA26vo

I have the same multimeter that he uses. You do need one to do this, but it is nice to know it can be pretty much the cheapest one you can find.

You don't need the other tools. The multimeter takes a little more time, but tells you everything that the fancy phase tester he uses does. As to the polarity tester, I just use simple magnetic compass. Point it at the top of the coil and it will tell you whether the top is N or S ;-)

If you buy aftermarket pickups all this may be mapped out for you already:

Attachment 45576

The guy (Chris from Highline Guitars) in the vid won't tell you the "right" way to wire your humbucker, and says it depends on the sound you are going after. Technically true. However, the most common way to wire them is in series. That would be the way the pickup is wired in TD's example and like the Seymour Duncan in the pic.



*Technically ohms readings alone won't tell you how hot a pickup is. This is particularly true if you have pickups of different type or from different manufacturers. However, in matched sets like what you get with a kit or an aftermarket "set" of pickups it will be "close enough for jazz" ;-)

Something for the more adventurous:

Converting a 2-wire humbucker to a 4-wire humbucker.

This is a link to WeirdBit's Thread from a while ago:

https://www.buildyourownguitar.com.a...ll=1#post47993

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Trevor Davies

Something for the more adventurous...

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One of the things that I really like about this post from Weirdbits is that it is also sort of a short course on what's in a humbucking pickup and how it works in the mechanical sense. It's interesting even if you never crack open a covered humbucker.

When I got my first kit, this post led me to an interesting discovery. The kit was a bass that came with a set of covered humbuckers that had flat tops with no screws. I assumed that it would have bar-magnet pole pieces like in a Thunderbird or Firebird humbucker. Instead what I discovered was that the pickup was actually a six-pole guitar humbucker. That led to swapping out the pickups...and after that a whole lot more modifications.