Originally Posted by
Simon Barden
It's not really 'wrong', as the kit suppliers keep changing pickup sources and some are single wire + screen and some are 4-wire + screen. It was 100% correct at some point. What is really needed now is to have on them are both variants shown.
There are also plenty of relies on the forum as to how to connect up the pickups, and whilst it's not got a particularly useful search engine, a bit of looking should have given you the answer you require. It has been done before.
But here it is. The extra wires are not for tone controls. The humbucking pickups have two coils, and each coil has two ends of the coil wire that need connecting. On the pickups you have in the kit, those four ends are brought out down the cable, and in addition, they are protected by an overall braid screen, which is also connected to the pickup baseplate. The four connections allow for the pickup to be wired with the coils in series, the coils in parallel or for a coil split for single coil operation.
The 'silver' is the braid cable screen. This will always need to be connected to a ground
You say 'red and white are soldered together and green and white are soldered together' , which would make red and white and green all soldered together which doesn't make sense, though if they are, then some pics of the cable ends would help here.
The standard PBG pickup 4-wire connections are:
Black - signal hot
Green+screen - signal ground
Red+White - wires that connect the two pickup coils together internally. Leave unconnected and tape up the bare ends to avoid them shorting out. If you want a coil split, then this red/white combo is connected to an extra 2-way switch that can connect the wires to ground.
So the black normally goes to the volume pot connection as shown in the PBG wring diagram, the green and (bare wire) screen get soldered to the back of a pot and the red and white wires remain unconnected (and as mentioned, need to be insulated to prevent unintentional grounding and single coil operation).
In a single wire + screen connection, the red and white wires are connected together within the pickup itself, (so it can only be used as a humbucker). In the same way, the green and screen are connected together within the pickup, so only the braided screen needs bringing out, surrounding the black 'hot' signal wire.
Different pickup manufacturers have different wiring colour conventions, so whilst almost all use red, green, white, black + screen cables for their '4-wire' pickups (as its a standard mass-produced multicore colour combination, so cheap and common to buy), the uses of those colours are swapped around (e.g which colour is the hot signal), which is why you will find multiple pickup wiring conversion charts around on the web. Only the braid screen is the same in all cases.
So have a look at your cables again and you should be able to sort out black for the signal hot, Black for the signal hot connection, green+screen for the signal ground, and leave the red+white pair unconnected but the end insulated with tape or heat-shrink.
Hope that helps.