A forum member asked me for some wiring options for a Tele build with a single coil bridge pickup and a 4-wire humbucker in the neck. The split-able humbucker adds quite a few wiring options, so I thought I'd draw up a few diagrams and post them for anyone who is interested.
First, a note. Mixing pickups types, particularly from different guitars and/or manufacturers etc, can require a bit of extra work. When combining the pickups you may have issues of phase and, if you're linking a single coil to a split humbucker, potentially hum-cancelling problems - or lack thereof. Essentially, you need to work out if the two pickups are in phase and, when split, which coil will give you a hum-cancelling pair. If you're lucky, you can just look up your pickups and see how they need to be wired. Alternatively, you can use a multimeter to test the pickups (this video may help), but connecting the pickups/coils with clip leads in various combos and into a headphone amp will soon tell you if you're humming under fluoro lights.
For consistency, I've use Seymour Duncan colours for the humbucker wiring in the following wiring diagrams. This means that the coil pairs are black & white and red & green. Depending on how you wire your coil splits, one coil or the other will be active when split. If the active coil is the one you need for hum-cancelling, great. If it's not then you either have to change your split wiring, or change your coil ordering so you get the coil you want. Same goes for phase issues.
So, if you need the red & green coil for hum-cancelling but the split wiring gives you black & white, then you need to swap the coil order as above. Note that reversing the phase automatically changes your coil order, so if your have the correct coil but it's out of phase then you'll need to reverse the phase and swap the coil order. If you check the diagram above, the first and last example have the same coil order but with the phase reversed. I'll make a note with each of my diagrams which coil is active for any splits. The key is to work out the colour pairs for your pickups and then translate them to the colours I've used.
In all the diagrams I use '+' to indicate parallel link between pickups and 'X' to indicate a series link. If the diagram has both parallel and series I'll normally state which is which in square brackets. Also, '(hum)' indicates the neck pickup is in humbucker mode, while '(split)' indicates only a single coil is active.
3-way Lever switch diagrams
Standard Tele layout, no splits:
Bridge with split neck in middle position (red & green coil active when split):
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