Which wires to hook together?

[belwar]

Ok, im examining a wal bass pickup right now... The pickup is made up of eight individual coils. Each string has two pickups, hooked up in series. Making the output 4 coils.

There are 5 wires coming out of the pickup:

Coil Set 1 Hot (Blue),
Coil Set 2 Hot (Red),
Coil Set 3 Hot (White),
Coil Set 4 Hot (Black),
Mutual Ground (Green)

How would I connect the wires together to get a TOTAL DCR reading of the pickup in one shot.. I know that the resistances are in series so its very easy to do R1+R2+R3+R4=R, but I need them hooked together to be able to get total inductance readings, and resonance peak readings. I also am going to have a frequency analysing done, and that requires 1 hot lead and one ground.

Do I need to split the ground 4 ways and then join them in series?

Any ideas?

bel

[David Schwab]

That's the 4 string pickup?

OK, on the pickup I have here, green is ground. Orange and White are one row of coils in series, and that reads 9.57K. Black and Blue is the other row of coils, and it reads 9.66K.

This pickup is wired up like a humbucker. Each row covers all four strings. But that's not what you have.

On the those pickups, green is ground and each of the other wires is one string (two coils). What's the DC resistance between one of the wires and the green wire? Each coil should be 2.4K, so you should get either 4.8K (series) or 1.2K (parallel). Unless they wind those differently.

You can only connect them all together in parallel, though they are isolated from one another at the preamp, so it's like they each have their own channel on a mixer. To wire them up differently the circuit board has to be altered.

[belwar]

Can I split the ground wire though? i.e. if I split it in five, then I get a hot lead and a ground for each pickup, which I could then jury-rig into one big series circuit. Probably not possible though.. I bought of piece of bread board to try various connections. I cant clip the fancy molex connector off the end of the board.

I wonder how I could determine if the wal preamp is processing the signal in series or parallel, or some combination of both.. Seems strange to have one common ground for all the signal.. it's not possible to turn it back to full series is it?

[David Schwab]

On that pickup each string is run out separately. My understanding is that they connect to the preamp isolated from each other, so they aren't really in parallel.

The idea is to have a lower impedance pickup for what Wal calls "flat response, humbucking pick-ups".

The pickup I have here was for the old Pro series preamp. You can see the connections on that in the schematic. They list the colors as Red to hot, black and white as the series connection, and blue and green to ground.

So you can't make them connect in series without unwiring them from the circuit board, and that defeats the idea of the pickup.

[belwar]

So, so quad low(er) impedance pickups. now that makes sense.