Coil Split Install

Hi, I'm Mike Sullivan. Welcome to Guitar Tech. How to do it yourself. Hello once again. This guitar was featured in a previous video on swapping out pickups for the Schecter C1EA. And now I have decided that I am going to install a switch to do coil splits. Stay tuned. Now all that's needed for this custom job is some wire to connect the rhythm and treble pickups. The red and white wires on the pickups will connect to these. And these will connect to the center lugs on the switch. The bottom lugs are grounded out using this little wire to the casing. And then that all installs to the existing wiring in the guitar. The first thing I want to do is remove the treble control for the magnetic pickups. Because I want the push-pull pot on my tone control, not on my volume control. The other thing I want to do is, now that I've loosened the potentiometer, I need to remove the pickup assembly. Because all the wiring for the pickup sits right underneath it. So I need to access that. Okay, as you can see now, I've removed some of the electrical tape on the inside wiring job. Each pickup has a red and white lead going to one of the coils. And they are soldered together on each pickup. That's how you wire the Seymour Duncans when you're just running them in standard humbucking mode and you don't want to switch them. But since the two wires are soldered together, you can run the two wires into one wire. That's where the little wire I mentioned earlier comes in. And I will use the black wire for the bridge pickup and the red wire for the rhythm pickup. My own little code there, you like it? So, each one of these will then be soldered in place like that. And then this will run to the switch. Okay, well, as you can see, I've got the wires hooked up and soldered. Now to reapply the tape and secure these all together so that they won't cause a problem. Now that the wires have been secured and routed through the F-hole over on this side, I can now reinstall the pickup and the work on this section of the guitar is finished. Well, I managed to wiggle out the pot by pushing it through the hole and just using the F-hole to get my fingers in there and maneuver it. And finally I got lucky and I got a hold of the shaft through the hole here and slid it over to the F-part, the middle of the F-hole where I can pull it out. And it's just a tone control, so you just have a cap on there and a ground and hot wire going to the middle here and the ground goes to the outside lug. So I just need to duplicate that on the switch pot here and then install the other two wires to the switch for the coil activation and deactivation. And I'll show you that as soon as I get it done. Okay, wiring is completed and the guitar is tuned up and it does work. Pointing out what the work was, this red wire here is the hot wire coming from the pickups to the middle lug. There's the capacitor located here which is soldered to the outside lug and to ground. The rhythm red wire here goes to the rhythm pickup going to the middle lug on the switch. The black cable wire going to the other lug, as you can hear it's live. And then the two lugs closest to the pot are the ones that you ground to ground out the other coil. It's not these top ones at the bottom of the switch. If you want to call this the bottom and then the pot side the top. I first wired it down here and it operated backwards. So I put the ground on the top and then when the switch is in its normal position you have full humbucking and when you pull out the knob it will be split coil. So both pickups will go to single coil mode together. So now it's time to put it back in and finish up the work. Ok, I'm plugged into a JC120, very clean amp. The job is finished, everything works. I've disengaged the piezo so I'm only on the magnetic pickups at the moment. And this is what the rhythm sounds like in your rhythm, normal, full humbucking position on all three positions. Here. Both pickups. Ok, double pickup. Coil split. Just pop your knob out. Now that's front rhythm pickup. For a comparison between the two. Full humbucking. Split. Full humbucking with both pickups. Split both pickups. Treble pickup. Humbucking and split. Nice and spanky in the split mode. Compared to this. Nice and glassy up here. I like the variations, they're pretty different sounding when you kick in the single coils. They're known for that. The JB and the Jazz are really popular because of the way they sound. Had to do the coil split. So it works, I like it. Enjoy it. I think it was $14 or so, just under $14 for the push-pull pot at the local music store. And it took me, oh, probably an hour to do. So I hope you enjoyed the lesson here on installing a coil tap. Have fun. Well thanks for watching and see you next time on Guitar Tech. How to do it yourself.