Need humbucker specific advice

[wiringbasses]

Hi all!
I'm looking for some specific hot rodding advice:

I had a broken humbucker and I gave it 6 leads , start and stop for each coil and a ground for each coil. I don't know how to determine the magnetism or the direction of the winding. I have a multimeter, but not sure how to use it. I am skilled at soldering.
Now I'd Like to start hot rodding it, but I'm not sure what to do.

I'd like to take advantage of all these leads, but don't want to use push-pots. I only have one humbucker and I'd like it to have a bunch of options for a bass including

-Phase-shifting
-Coil-split (cut)
-Series-Parallel switch

Any suggestions or diagrams?

tags: humbucker, hotrodding, series-parallel, phase shifting, wiring, options, coil-split

[Sweetfinger]

A ground for each coil is redundant. The shielding and baseplate should be connected to ground. Take one of the coil leads- doesn't matter which one, and ground it. Take the other lead from that same coil and connect it to one of the leads from the other coil. The remaining lead is the hot lead. Wire it up and listen. If it sounds really funky, and thin, reverse the leads on the second coil.

Now you have your humbucker wired standard and can apply any standard wiring scheme or coil options.

[wiringbasses]

A ground for each coil is redundant. The shielding and baseplate should be connected to ground. Take one of the coil leads- doesn't matter which one, and ground it. Take the other lead from that same coil and connect it to one of the leads from the other coil. The remaining lead is the hot lead. Wire it up and listen. If it sounds really funky, and thin, reverse the leads on the second coil.

Now you have your humbucker wired standard and can apply any standard wiring scheme or coil options.

thanks man, any idea how to hot rod it?

Again I'm hoping for the 3 above:
phase shift
series parallel
coil split

don't care if its alot of switches

[denitronik]

You can get up to six combinations: series out of phase (standard humbucking), series in phase, parallel out of phase, parallel in phase, coil 1 alone or coil 2 alone. I used a 6 position rotary control to get those sounds. I don't have the schematics any more but it's easy to figure out. But frankly I used three of those sounds the others were kind of useless to me. The in phase sounds are too thin and the parallel out of phase is too low in impedance and makes your tone control kind useless.

[wiringbasses]

Thanks Detronik, and others!

Concerning the sound you talked about, is that on a guitar or a bass?

I'm hot rodding a bass, and not sure if those 6 tones would be useless to me too.

Also, I don't have a 6 pole, only 2s. Is it possible to do those 6 combinations without that 6 pole switch?

[denitronik]

That was for a guitar but the in phase connections would be worse (in my opinion) with a bass because you would loose all the low frequencies.
I'm not discouraging you to try it however.
I'm sure that the series out of phase, parallel out of phase and single coils would give you a lot of different tones to play with. Also don't forget that the single coils sounds loose their humbucking quality and you will pickup a lot of electromagnetic noises.

[denitronik]

Sorry! I missed the second part of your post.
I had DiMarzio pickups that had 5 wires: two for each coil and a separate ground.
The way did it (if I remember correctly) was with a 6 position 4 pole rotary switch (made by centralab in the 70s) one pole for each pickup wire, and two wires(+ -) can out of the switch to go to the volume/tone controls. For each position i would wire (or not) the four coil wires according to what was needed to go to the two outgoing wires.
The ground was kept out of the switching circuit and connected to the negative wire at the output plug (sort of a balanced wiring) to avoid cross-grounding.
I know it's a little overcomplicated but it worked. There's probably a way to simplify this.