Spare pair of humbuckers turned single-coil...

I had a spare pair of Epiphone ProBuckers (widely considered to be really excellent humbucker pickups) surplused in my take-off pickup bin.

When they were installed, with a split-coil option volume pot, they sounded quite good in humbucker mode, but truly fantastic in single-coil mode. Anyway, I removed them to my surplus pickup bin a while back to employ a new set of Gretsch FIlter'trons in the guitar.

Thinking back to how wonderful they sounded, when in split-coil mode, I decided to try them out in a Tele of mine, wired up purely as single-coil pickups (because I would never play them in dual-coil mode, and didn't want to be bothered with extra switches or complex switching pots.)

I did just that today. Of the four leads and ground coming from each pickup, I used the green lead on each as the "hot" lead, and grounded all the other leads. This effectively disables one coil in the pickup, turning the humbucker into a single-coil pickup.

Popped them in my Sea Foam Pearl Tele tonight and found them to have a delightfully remarkable tone.

You get all the single-coil attributes that most of us here love... highly-detailed, very clear and articulate, sparkly bright. They don't sound like Tele, nor Strat, single coil pickups - they have their own voice, clearly single-coil, which is awesome.

As one who no longer enjoys the typical tones from PAF-ish humbuckers, I had relegated these pickups as surplus and tucked them away. BUT, this little experiment showed me how wonderful a set of surplus humbuckers can sound, when employed in single-coil mode. Essentially, I got a new set of great sounding pickups by raiding a pile of surpluses pickups. That's a GREAT deal, that sounds great.

 

jvin... you are a constant, steady source of creative and technical guitar wisdom!

 

I'm really thrilled to finally be catching on to what some of you have been doing for years.

I can see the variety of ways to "sort of" get there (single-coil tone) with a pair of buckers.

I like the rewiring idea, rather than having to crack open the pickups and try to remove slugs, or altering the pickup height and pole pieces dramatically. Rewiring quickly and easily removes one of the coils, giving the easiest pure option of rendering a bucker into a single-coil. THAT IS, assuming the humbucker has four leads to work with.

On a twin-lead humbucker, you would have to disassemble the pickup and separate the connection between the two coils, creating four accessible leads to be able to do this. I have actually done that with a pair of Gibson Classic '57s that I thought I wanted to get fancy with, switching-wise. I wanted to replace the tall-legs with short legs for Fender use. So, I figured while I was tearing them apart to replace the bases & legs, I might as well turn them into four-lead pickups. The project worked, but was a good "bit-of-a-job" to get done. I did learn a lot about humbuckers by doing that, though.

I can see why many have done this approach with humbuckers. Mine weren't at all "muddy" as humbuckers (it actually surprised me how good the Epi Probuckers are as humbuckers), but in the end, they still had that faint humbucker "veil" over the tone, rather than ringing bright and clear, like the single coils that were lurking under the covers!

I'm not familiar with Scott Grove. The only reason I even thought of doing this is that the sound in "split-coil" position was so good, I decided to manually split the coils and do away with all that switching involved. I'm not surprised that others have done this, many times, over the years.

 

joeford... not sure what version of ProBuckers that you had, but I think that Epiphone designers re-did them not too long ago. Using all top grade components, as the Gibsons do. They made quite a well-received splash with them!

As far as PAF-humbuckers go, these aren't dark, in my view. But no matter, it's their split-coil tones that I think are really awesome. The single coils are running about 4.1k.

Before this little experiment, I was considering putting Tele pickups back in my Sea Foam Pearl Tele, but now, the way these sound... I plan to keep it as is! Unless and until I get restless and decide to try something else with the guitar.

I do have a pair of TV Jones Classics in-bound, and no idea what instrument I will deploy them in yet. I don't think they're going to bump these ProBuckers, though. There are other options.

 

One could, if that was important to them.

For me, though, that is more effort and complexity than I have interest in or need for, especially considering I don't really enjoy humbucker tones any more.

Straight single-coil, or Gretsch-type/TV Jones pickups are really doing it for me these days.

 

It is grand to find your bliss, whatever it is.

I have yet to explore the world of Bill Lawrence pickups. Someday, I'll get there!

 

Indeed! And for some people that may be an important difference.

 

Tim E... interesting, and good points!