Humbucker in parallel out of phase - octavia effect?

[dwmorrin]

A customer brought me this odd, clear cover, hex screw humbucker that sounded odd. When playing around the 12th fret, it was extremely similar sounding to a clean octavia pedal sound ("octave up"/frequency doubling effect).

Looking inside, this humbucker was wired with the two coils in parallel and out of phase.
The guitar is a '70s SG Deluxe, and the pickup was in the neck position.

Both coils read 6.5k dc res, and 3.91H. They read identical.
A dimarzio, wired the same in the bridge position, has no such special effect.

Is this a common effect of this type of wiring I'm just becoming aware of, or is this an oddity?
Anyone else have this happen before?

[the great waldo]

Hi

It sounds like the magnets might have been pulling on the strings, which is common on single coils but i've not seen it on a humbucker before.

Cheers

Andrew

[David Schwab]

This is common and fairly well known. I used to do it all the time back in the 70s when phase switches were a common mod on guitars. Worked on my Rick basses too.

I think it works because the out of phase pickups reduce the fundamental and enhance the harmonics. When you add distortion and play up past the 12th fret you hear the octave effect. You can also hear this without having the pickups out of phase, but it's not nearly as noticeable.

[bbsailor]

This is common and fairly well known. I used to do it all the time back in the 70s when phase switches were a common mod on guitars. Worked on my Rick basses too.

I think it works because the out of phase pickups reduce the fundamental and enhance the harmonics. When you add distortion and play up past the 12th fret you hear the octave effect. You can also hear this without having the pickups out of phase, but it's not nearly as noticeable.

David,

Here is a mod that I did to a Telecaster-Like G&L guitar. The person who plays it does so professionally in the Atlantic City area and he finds it to be very versatile, capable of playing fat jazz to funky rock.

Here it is. Put in a 4-way telecaster switch that combines the pickups in series as well as parallel, along with the traditional neck or bridge pickups. Put a push pull pot on the tone pot to flip the phase of the neck pickup. Use stacked/concentric 500K pots for individual control of each pickup. Here is the trick for this to work in a creative way. Wire the volume pots for individual volume control with the pickup leads going to the outer pot lug for ground and the hot pickup lead going to the center pot lug and the pickup volume output from the other outer lug. Then, when the pickups are used in either the series or parallel combination and switched out of phase a slight move of one of the volume pots (near one tenth of a turn) will cause a notch filter shift in frequency, sort of like a Varitone to change the out of phase tone. I have not seen this mod to do this out of phase tonal shift documented before.

This is easy to add to any Telecaster-like guitar without making any mod other than extending the length of the switch slot to accomodate the longer 4-position switch throw range.

Try it.

Joseph Rogowski

[the great waldo]

Hi Joseph

You won't have to extend the slot if you have an original American 3 or 5 way switch. The slot on the 4 way is the same length.

Cheers

Andrew

David,

Here is a mod that I did to a Telecaster-Like G&L guitar. The person who plays it does so professionally in the Atlantic City area and he finds it to be very versatile, capable of playing fat jazz to funky rock.

Here it is. Put in a 4-way telecaster switch that combines the pickups in series as well as parallel, along with the traditional neck or bridge pickups. Put a push pull pot on the tone pot to flip the phase of the neck pickup. Use stacked/concentric 500K pots for individual control of each pickup. Here is the trick for this to work in a creative way. Wire the volume pots for individual volume control with the pickup leads going to the outer pot lug for ground and the hot pickup lead going to the center pot lug and the pickup volume output from the other outer lug. Then, when the pickups are used in either the series or parallel combination and switched out of phase a slight move of one of the volume pots (near one tenth of a turn) will cause a notch filter shift in frequency, sort of like a Varitone to change the out of phase tone. I have not seen this mod to do this out of phase tonal shift documented before.

This is easy to add to any Telecaster-like guitar without making any mod other than extending the length of the switch slot to accomodate the longer 4-position switch throw range.

Try it.

Joseph Rogowski

[dwmorrin]

This is common and fairly well known. I used to do it all the time back in the 70s when phase switches were a common mod on guitars. Worked on my Rick basses too.

I think it works because the out of phase pickups reduce the fundamental and enhance the harmonics. When you add distortion and play up past the 12th fret you hear the octave effect. You can also hear this without having the pickups out of phase, but it's not nearly as noticeable.

Thanks for verifying the effect! I like your theory there. I am going to have to play around with this, adding some active electronics, to try and enhance the effect. The out of phase coils give you a big piece of the octavia circuit "for free." Some boosting and some diodes should complete the puzzle for a cheap, onboard octavia pedal. Might be a desirable product for some players.

[madzub]

i once had a couple pickups, a tele bridge and a humbucker neck iirc, wired series out of phase and it really got a great octavia tone, which was more obvious in certain spots on the neck (mostly above the 12th fret) and could be optimized with precise pickup height. It really came down to the right pickups; it doesnt work so well with just any 2 pickups wired out of phase. Joseph's idea seems good for finding the right blend; i've been meaning to do this setup to get the Peter Green variable out-of-phase sound on my guitar, however his OOP sound didn't really have the octavia thing going on.

[Sock Puppet]

Peter Green variable out-of-phase sound on my guitar

Along these lines?

https://soundcloud.com/whitehill-2/mr-green

[madzub]

Ya, that's pretty much the PG tone. Notice how it doesn't really have the octavia sound going on? So not just any out of phase sound will give the octavia sound; there must be other variables involved. I think it helps having the bridge pickup further away from the bridge. In Les Pauls, it's very close to the bridge. A tele, particularly under the low strings, is quite a bit further from the bridge, which i think helps to cancel the fundamental and reinforce the 2nd harmonic between the two out of phase pickups.

Of course, the original post was about a single neck humbucker pickup doing the octavia sound alone, so i've gone off course.

[Sock Puppet]

I'll admit to being off course too - have you seen the "Answer" ?

Doug Wilkes demonstrates The Answer guitar - YouTube