Pickup Splitting

[Riffmeister]

I want a neck pup to use slightly for leads, but more for anything clean I play. I used an Air Norton, and it sounded really thick for the lead stuff, but it was sort of muddy for the clean.

Will splitting the coil give me what I want or will that just give me a less output muddied tone?

I searched on here and didn't find much infor about the Dimarzio liquifire, but on their site ,they claim that this is just the pup for me, howerever they don't give a sound clip of it doing anything clean.

Also regarding pups in general, I have noticed that humbuckers that use metal covers only have one set of pole pieces. Is there a reason they don't have adjustable poles on both coils like a standard humbucker, or is it just a cosmetic thing?

[Foulacy]

yes, the clean sound will clear right up. the only problem with coil splitting is loss of volume.

[Grandturk]

On humbucker aesthetic design:

Well... if you look at the patent drawings:

http://www.google.com/patents?id=wxoCAAAAEBAJ&printsec=drawing&zoom=4#v=onepage&q=&f=false

You can see the original humbuckers were designed to have two sets of slug coils underneath a cover. I don't recall Gibson every issuing this design early on - so at some point they swapped a set of screws in for the coils and cut the covers to match. This is what set the "look" for all humbuckers to follow.

Fender had a humbucker later on in the Tele Customs that had screws in both bobbins and the covers cut to show 3 in one and 3 in the other.

I believe Dan Armstrong had the first blade style pickups in the clear guitars - what were they called??? Dimarzio introduced double allen head poles. Bill Lawrence and Joe Barden popularized blades.

Pickup makers will tell you that the construction of the pole has specific impact to the production of tone, but I have no idea about which does what.

These days, if you want a traditional look, you go with the slug coil and screw coil.

On splitting

Splitting a humbucker activates just a single coil, so what you essentially will have is a true single coil pickup. However, a humbucker's coil is not built the same way as a true single coil. The coil is smaller and the poles are just steel connected to a magnet.

So typically, you will not get "true" single coil sound. What I've gotten in the past is kind of like a crappy single coil sound - like you'd get on a cheapo guitar. Its usable, sure, but never as good as or better than an actual single coil. Perfect for live situations when you can't tell the difference anyway.

As for the Liquidfire - I am also interested in this pickup, however, it is a humbucker sound. It may have a lot of clarity, but its not going to sound like a single. Something like a Humbucker from Hell or a Bluesbucker is a humbucking pickup specifically designed to sound like a single coil. Check one of those out.

[toejam]

If you use a really hot humbucker, then it'll sound closer to a single coil pup when split.
Do you play with a single-channel amp or an amp with separate clean and distortion channels? If you've got a single-channel amp, then just lower your volume control to clean the sound up when using the neck pup.

[DonP]

I get great single coil tones splitting full shreds - neck and/or bridge. I don't notice that huge a loss in volume - of course a single is going to be lower power than a humbucker, but even a split full shred neck sounds fine.

[Riffmeister]

Thanks guys, kinda sounds like you have to settle for a happy medium. When I had that air Norton, I had to use a Boss EQ to boost the highs for my clean channel and to take some of the low end away, but I think that was due to the crappy sharred EQ of the MArshall now that I remember.

I never fooled with strats or single coils, so I really don't know that that is the kind of sound I am looking for in a clean sound, just something more crisp than what I got out of the Air Norton.

Speaking of a Full Shred, I jsut read that that pup is not considered a hi gain. I have an original FS and that thing smokes!!!!

[DonP]

Speaking of a Full Shred, I jsut read that that pup is not considered a hi gain. I have an original FS and that thing smokes!!!!

Who said that?

Also, pickups don't have gain, they have output. The Full Shred has higher output than a PAF for sure. It's about the same output as a Super Distortion or a Duncan Custom, maybe less because it has an Alnico 5 instead of a ceramic.

I bet a Super D would sound good split.

I split lots of pickups in my guitars. I think you'll be happy with whatever you split. One thing I will say is that a hot pickup split (like a 500T or JB) will still sound very hot under distortion. Clean is where you'll notice a bigger difference.

[toejam]

Speaking of a Full Shred, I jsut read that that pup is not considered a hi gain. I have an original FS and that thing smokes!!!!

It's high output. There's both a bridge and neck version. The neck version is a little lower in output and has a little bit more treble.

[Riffmeister]

IF I remember correctly, I think I read that under the Seymour Duncan pup discription on Warmoths site.

[Riffmeister]

Well, I was wrong, it wasn't the Wamoth site, maybe I did read the description for the neck model

[toejam]

It says high output on Seymour's site. There's even a tone and output number chart. http://www.seymourduncan.com/product...10_full_shred/

[Newc]

I had a Full Shred bridge pickup - didn't find it "high output" at all, to be honest. But then, I was comparing it to the Duncan Distortion.....

At any rate, DiMarzio uses a mismatched coil design, meaning that both coils are slightly different from each other (most other pickup brands use the same coil specs on both coils, but one is reverse-wound from the other for the humbucking effect).
Thus, splitting to one coil of a DiMarzio that uses the mismatched coil design will give one sound, while splitting to the other coil will give a similar but different sound.

[Riffmeister]

Newc,

How you been man? Long time no chat

This full shred of mine has given me a lot of headaches. It sounds like crap with all these solid state amps I have been trying out and it doesn't clean up well at all.

But then again, I ran it into a zoom recorder and used the simulator and got an AWESOME sound with that, of course I had to set the gain in the simulator from 20 down to like 12 on the Marshall preset


I don't know why ,but I have always prefered Dimarzios to Duncans, and I don't know why there arent more Jacksons that come with them. The newest Jackson I'm gonna get is coming stock with a Tone Zone and and an Evolution in the neck.

I have no experience with the evolution, will it sound good split and using it for clean stuff?

[DonP]

My full shred set is in a very fat guitar - Charvel 750XL

short scale
set neck
fixed bridge
big mahogany body
rosewood fretboard
bridge pickup closer to the neck (bassier) then most guitars

On a bright guitar, it might sound thin. Ibanez has a model (long scale, bolt on, floating trem)with the full shred as a stock pickup, and it sounds very different from my guitar. much brighter and "buzz saw" like.

In my 750XL, it's very fat and chunky. At first I was a little worried about it being too bright, so I just tried the bridge pickup alone. Once I was happy with that, I picked up the neck pickup. I have a Super 5 way E switch, so I get:

Neck humbucking
Neck single
Neck single + bridge single (humbucking). Tone pot is a push pull to reverse the phase.
Bridge single
Bridge humbucking

[marnold]

FWIW I tried both cutting a coil and series/parallel switching and much preferred series/parallel. When the coils are wired in parallel, you get a decent drop in output, the tone gets much brighter (almost single coil-like), but it's still hum-canceling. If you are even slightly handy with a soldering iron, you can try it out both ways pretty easily.