In my own (first) project guitar, I did not know quite what to expect, so I built it with HSH pickups and two complete signal paths.
#Jazz guitar single coil vs humbucker mods#
Of course, vari-tones and similar mods provide a IIRC, humbuckers often use 0.047 capacitors.Metal players may use 1M pots for humbuckers. Humbuckers generally use 500K pots, single coils generally use 250K.Keep in mind that there are further differences in the traditional humbucking and single coil setups, such as pots and caps. I too wanted the best of both worlds and I took the following approach. You could tap a 4-wire humbucker for a single coil sound, but in my experience the tapped humbucker doesn't sound as "warm" as a separate single coil. You will surely not be able to play a strong single coil in the H-H guitar.
This is not available with a H-S-H Vai-style guitar. With Les Pauls, you can set, for example, the neck volume to zero, so the switch becomes bridge-bridge-none, making it a kill switch.
It is doable to set the circuit so that the middle position is neck-bridge, but generally, you have it in H-H guitars and not H-S-H guitars.Įither way, H-S-H guitars are generally master volume and master tone, while Les Paul-style H-H guitars have separate volume and tone. This is what you cannot get with H-H setup.Īs the H-S-H wiring is usually a variation on Strat wiring, you generally get the middle pickup in middle position, while H-H guitars generally have neck-bridge as the middle position. When Ibanez came to Steve Vai about making a signature guitar for him, he said he wanted to get those positions and tones with neck and bridge humbuckers, with coils tapped so you'd get one coil of the neck or bridge with the single coil in the middle, so it's a hum-less Strat setup. Eventually the middle pickup was made reverse wound and reversed polarity, so that neck-middle and bridge middle would effectively be noiseless, humbucking positions. Jimi Hendrix is a popularizer of this technique, and it became popular enough that the Strat got wired stock with five-position switches. Players discovered that, if you put the switch in the right position, you could get the neck-and-middle and bridge-and-middle sounds. Granted, single-coil, so just bear with me. Time was, Fender Stratocasters used a three-position switch, corresponding to neck, middle and bridge pickups.