Advice about variable humbucker to single coil split?

[jrfrond]

I have an old T-60 with a broken neck pickup. After I rewind the p'up some day, I'll probably replace the patented Peavey tone circuits with traditional tone circuits, using push-pull tone pots for coil cut. Personally, I never found the Peavey circuit particularly useful; it gives you the choice of noisy icepick single coil, muddy muted humbucker, or "something in between"*. I used to leave the tone controls at one setting: start at 10, then roll off just to the point where the hum is bearable.

I agree with this 100%. It might have been a cool (and patented, to boot) wiring scheme back in the old days, but in retrospect (and I had a T-60 guitar), not particularly useful. Besides, I developed a terrible intolerance to pickup hum, so split 'buckers just don't make it for me.

[rjb]

I installed/modded the variable coil-cancelling tone control in conjunction with a compensated neck volume control..... Cancelling one of the neck coils to lower the inductance and raise the resonant frequency, in tandem with a bass-cutting volume pot, gives a nice range of sounds, while still letting full-volume/full-tone sounds provide as much balls as the stock instrument always had.

I'm glad you found a way to get useful sounds from the T-60 circuit!
As you probably know, the original T-60 pickups were 3-wire, potted in epoxy to make the coil connection points inaccessible.
With both pickups in coil-cut mode, they form a "hum-enhancing" pair.

-rb

[Mark Hammer]

Single coils vary in the extent to which they pick up hum. I've wound single coils that pick up much less hum than commercial pickups. My point is that the "hum-enhancing" aspects may be more a function of the specific pickups than the circuit, per se.

[rjb]

Single coils vary in the extent to which they pick up hum. I've wound single coils that pick up much less hum than commercial pickups. My point is that the "hum-enhancing" aspects may be more a function of the specific pickups than the circuit, per se.

Kewel, good to know.

Thanks,
-rb