The 30 year tune-up: serious and parallax

Let’s try something new

It’s time to think about the ideal wiring of the refurbished Washburn.

The original configuration was simply humbucker at the bridge, plus 2 single coils with a five position selector.

This gave a decent set of tones, but more is possible in principle.

Now, the old wiring did not even make use of shielded connectors for the single coils and hence for the modern environment really needed to be completely rebuilt.

While we’re here…

We may as well give things a bit of a tune up.

Plus I like, already drilled a ton of holes…

The highest priority for the changes is seeing what changes are worthwhile for the bridge humbucker. The reasoning for this is that the single coils are intrinsically limited in options — and further, as the remaining option is effectively only reversing phase and the pickups are very similar in properties, the end result is a very thin tone. It’s a valid choice, but I’m not terribly interested in it.

Back to the humbucker options:

1. Coil splitting

We know what the pickup sounds like in these configurations:

Does pickup position make that much of a difference? —” lite edition”

2. series / parallel options

For this option, we only know the sound for the series wiring arrangement.

We do know that this pickup is a bit of a beast in series mode, and hence parallel mode would be a good experiment.

So let’s do it

Following this site, we find a couple of interesting facts: series parallel is quite easy, but not also including coil split mode.

Guitar Wiring Site

Results

The pickup in series, then parallel for some chords and some picked notes.

Conclusion

The parallel is very nice — the sound is quite close to the sound of the individual coils but with the delicious silence of the hum bucking effect. The series setting is what one would expect for a fairly hot humbucker. We can see the frequency envelope changes to one with a lower upper extent and a different shape.

Another benefit is that with the appropriate height adjustment, the parallel setting is well matched tonally and in volume with the single coils, leaving the series setting of the bridge for hooliganism at the flick of a switch.

On balance: it’s a keeper! And we get to keep the legacy sounds too!