pickup replacement on dime razorback

[wyomingrocks]

Hi this is for my nephew and not for me so any quick help would be deeply apprieciated.

I was ask to help in the pickup replacement on my nephews dean guitar. The origional pickup has a white wire and a ground.

The new pickup is a dimarzio, something or an other, came out of some metal guitar several years ago. It is believed to be a super distortion. It has four wires, I went to dimarzio's site to look at a schematic. NO luck. The replacement looks like it has four wires on it, it looked as thought two of them were used before the other two were never used.

I hooked it up from the green wire on the pickup to the ground wire on the old harness and hooked the red pickup wire to the wite wire of the old harness.

The sound didn't sound right. still had volume just didn't sound right. I hooked up my dvm to measure continuity from the pickup adjusting screw to the string on the the not replaced pickp and it is connected.

I hooked up the ohm meter from the new pickup adjustment screw to the strings and nothing, also tried to the other pickup and no continuity.

I thought maybe I had the wires swithced so I unsoldered and switched wires around this time the dimazio red wire on the pickup to ground on the wiring harness, and green on the pickp to white on the wiring harness still no luck.

It gets volume both ways I hook it up, but for some reason it is not as loud and don't sound that great.

does anyon have any experience hooking up a four wire pickup into a three way switch guitar with two volume and one tone.

Please help if you do, I would like to get him back to playing his music again,

thanks

[David Schwab]

It sounds like you are wiring the two coils out of phase. You need to reverse the leads on one of the coils.

Here's a listing of pickup maker's color codes:

http://www.stewmac.com/freeinfo/Elec...lor_codes.html

If it is a DiMarzio, or uses the DiMarzio color code, you wire the black and white wires together, and then the green is ground, and the red is hot.

If you do have a DiMarzio, you have the two coils wired out of phase, which gives a thin tone with little volume.

If it's not a DiMarzio, you can tell which two wires go to a coil by taking a reading with a VOM.