Do you know the difference bwteen coil splitting and coil tapping? I didn't

[Greg_L]

I always thought the terms were interchangeable.

Fender® News

[Guitargodgt]

So did I?

Honestly going from their description, coil tapping is fucking dumb.

[Greg_L]

So did I?

Honestly going from their description, coil tapping is fucking dumb.

Coil tapping seems like an overly technical way to roll your guitar volume back a little.

[JCH]

A coil tap changes the tone characteristics of the pickup. It's much more than rolling off the volume. You're right though, The description is pretty weak.

[mshilarious]

When you drop from two coils to one in a humbucker, of course you lose the noise rejection, and you drop the total number of turns, which means lower inductance and output impedance. That changes not only the overall output of the system, but the frequency response as well, basically reducing high frequency losses and shifting any resonance to a higher frequency.

Rolling off volume "a little" actually does the opposite, it increases output impedance which means greater high frequency losses to cable capacitance, and reduces resonance because the output impedance becomes more resistive than inductive.

A very clever pickup would "tap" to a pair of underwound coils such that humbucking was maintained . . . basically each coil would need a 50% tap. I'd invent that, but I suspect somebody else already has . . .

[Greg_L]

When you drop from two coils to one in a humbucker, of course you lose the noise rejection, and you drop the total number of turns, which means lower inductance and output impedance. That changes not only the overall output of the system, but the frequency response as well, basically reducing high frequency losses and shifting any resonance to a higher frequency.

Rolling off volume "a little" actually does the opposite, it increases output impedance which means greater high frequency losses to cable capacitance, and reduces resonance because the output impedance becomes more resistive than inductive.

A very clever pickup would "tap" to a pair of underwound coils such that humbucking was maintained . . . basically each coil would need a 50% tap. I'd invent that, but I suspect somebody else already has . . .

What about switching from series to parallel in a humbucker?

[Telegram Sam]

Would it be difficult to split my hot noiseless bridge pickup on my JB strat and have it switchable?

[aaronmcoleman]

I always thought they were the same. My only experience was with an Ibanez JS100 (the satriani model...I used to suck and choosing guitars), and basically it was a suck switch and I never used it.

[mshilarious]

What about switching from series to parallel in a humbucker?

That puts the inductance of the coils in parallel, and parallel inductance like parallel resistance drops the inductance to half the value of a coil (assuming the coils are the same, which they are supposed to be in a humbucker), or one-quarter the value the coils in series. That should increase high frequency response; whether or not it sounds brighter than a single coil depends on the load on the pickup--at some point the impedance gets low enough such that there is not a material change. It would help with situations like really long cables--again, until you decide to use the volume control and then suddenly the highs go away (which is why people do things like treble bypass caps or bleed caps, depending on their preference).

Also the tone control, since that is fixed capacitance as you change the output impedance of the pickup you shift the corner frequency of the tone control, such that if you drop the pickup into parallel the tone control suddenly might not seem to do that much.

Passive-pickup guitars are really a not very good system where every control affects the performance of every other control; basically the wrong way do to a circuit, but guitarists are used to it and they seem to like it, so . . . it does yield a lot of different tones, so long as you experiment enough to understand everything that changes.

[Greg_L]

I've read about and heard clips where switching a humbucker from series to parallel makes it sound like a single but without the hum, which in most cases would be better than just turning off half of a humbucker, as you would with with normal splitting.