A Modest Proposal to all pickup makers selling humbucking pickups to the wide world.

[David Schwab]

I always wondered about that and kind of guessed maybe it was because of whatever cable they were able to get at the time. I almost went with the Gibson scheme, but finally decided on SD because there seemed to be more of them out there, and like Terry said, they do have lots of nice wiring diagrams that are easy to find. By the way, when I put connectors on I use the EMG pinouts too.

It's the same four colors (red, black, white, & green) for most of the makers. What they did was switch how there were used. There was no reason to do that, except they wanted to be different.

You can find diagrams for all the makers, and it's easy to translate them from one to another.

[David King]

My most recent issue was with a pair of Anderson HBs. Anderson's documentation states that the series link is Green and White. One pickup was wired correctly, on the other white and green were start and finish of the same coil. It caused me a fair amount of soul searching. Yes, any idiot can measure the drc and figure out what coil is connected to what wire and then figure out the polarity with a magnet and an old school volt meter (which I'm not so sure everyone has) but when you have to take the strings on and off the guitar 3 times to pull the pickups, all while the customer is standing there thinking you are an incompetent oaf because you said the job would take a couple of hours at the most and nothing is working correctly after 5 hours.
What I'm saying is that when mistakes are made at the source, other people suffer. Soldering and unsoldering multiple wires inside a small cavity on a 4 pole, 5 position rotary switch hoping to hit on the correct combination or hum cancellation and proper phase on two, 4 wire humbuckers might seem like child's play to some people here it isn't my idea of a fun way to spend my Sunday afternoon.

Thank you Sunny for posting your PDF! PDFs are great but i'm not sure the content gets viewed by Google's crawlers which is where it needs to be.

[big_teee]

Black and white are the north slug coil.
red and green are the south screw coil.

[captcoolaid]

Switching over to /duncan scheme. Right now my older stuff has a diagram on my site

[SonnyW]

Thank you Sonny for posting your PDF! PDFs are great but i'm not sure the content gets viewed by Google's crawlers which is where it needs to be.

I did check the Google crawler and it did find my pdf, and within a week, but probably it was based on my meta tags or page title. And it was many, many pages down in the search results unless the search query included my name or the shop name. Anyway, if someone was searching for my particular humbucker color codes they could find it in the first few results on Google if they include my name, or also find it easily on my own website. Googling for humbucker pickup color codes returns lots of results. Honestly, I wish I had the problem that a ton of my pickups were out there on their second or third users, and the paperwork was long lost. I hope I will still be cranking them out when that happens.

By the way, I didn't copyright the pdf and anyone here is welcome to also use it if they like. It is pretty generic, quickly done, and was not all that great of an effort.

[foonting]

I use the Gibson standard ... if I'm not hung over ...

[RedHouse]

...Yes, any idiot can measure the drc and figure out what coil is connected to what wire and then figure out the polarity with a magnet and an old school volt meter...

Uh huh, or demand everyone publish their wire color codes.

[David Schwab]

...but when you have to take the strings on and off the guitar 3 times to pull the pickups, all while the customer is standing there thinking you are an incompetent oaf because you said the job would take a couple of hours at the most and nothing is working correctly after 5 hours. ...

Why wouldn't this have been something you can check from the control cavity? This is one of the first things I check for if a pickup sounds thin. It's pretty easy to swap two wires around and see.

A harder one was a Yamaha SG-200 that a customer brought in complaining that the pickups sounded weak and noisy. Turns out they were both wired up out of phase with themselves... from the factory! They were old school 2 conductor wiring, which meant I had to do surgery on the pickups. I've also seen this issue with some cheap Gibson mudbucker clones. They might be from Artec, but I'm not sure. But they were either wired up wrong, and/or had the magnets the wrong way.

I guess mistakes happen.

[David Schwab]

Uh huh, or demand everyone publish their wire color codes.

Exactly.

Two good sources are:

STEWMAC.COM : Color codes Free Information

and:

http://www.seymourduncan.com: Wiring Diagram

It still seems very odd to be the arbitrary nature of some of these. It's like almost out of spite that they would refuse to adopt someone else's color codes, just to be different. Would have made life easier for guitar techs if everyone had agreed on something.

[David King]

Let me reiterate. Yes mistakes DO happen. Why should the installer have to deal with your mistake? Posting your 4 color wiring allows the installer to verify that the mistake was yours and not his/hers. That's all I'm asking for. Apparently that's too much?

[jason lollar]

mines been posted on my site for at least ten years