Installing S.duncan Into Strat

[jid77]

erm, this is my first time installing a new pickup and i'm trying to learn to do it myself. To start off, im using s.duncan for all position(ie B,M,N) to avoid any additional problems(combination of the pickups provided from its website). The first question is, do i just follow the same wiring scheme as with the default fender pickups? if not, can anyone give info on how to do it? (or any useful url)

thanks

[GuitarMaestro]

All the info you need can be found on the offical Seymour Duncan homepage.

Basically you should connect the pu's the same as your old pu's. However if they are humbuckers they may have four wires each. In this case two of the wires need to be soldered together and the other two go where the old wires went.

Additionally you have to get the polarity right. That means that the ground wires should be wired to the volume pots casing NOT the hot wires. Which color the hot Seymour wires have I don't know. But it's definately described in the info under the link I write above.

[jid77]

niceee.

thanks

[jid77]

one more q'tion... s.duncan offers a rw/rp pickup, i dont really know in detail what this is except it can reduce hum. however if i am to install one with a rw/rp let say in the middle, do i have to use a rw/rp for the bridge and neck as well. The website has been really helpfull but i cant find the answer to this one..(yet)

[ripsrv]

no you shouldn't have to

[JoJo T. Magnifficent]

one more q'tion... s.duncan offers a rw/rp pickup, i dont really know in detail what this is except it can reduce hum. however if i am to install one with a rw/rp let say in the middle, do i have to use a rw/rp for the bridge and neck as well. The website has been really helpfull but i cant find the answer to this one..(yet)

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rw/rp = reverse wound/ reverse polarity i would guess. basically it causes the induced currents (hum) to cancel eachother because they travel in oposing directions in each coil. (i think)

[lovekraft]

The only place a RWRP pickup will benefit you is in the middle position. Don't use one anywhere else.

[jnewman]

The only place a RWRP pickup will benefit you is in the middle position. Don't use one anywhere else.

←

Let me clarify this a little bit: the way you get benifit is by using one in the middle position, and the only benefit you get is in positions 2 and 4 on the five-way switch - the combinations, respectively, of neck-middle and middle-bridge.

Here's the deal: Your pickups have magnets in them, and your guitar strings vibrate through those magnetic fields which creates an induced oscillating current in your guitar strings, which generates an induced oscillating electromagnetic field, which generates yet another induced electric current in your pickup's windings, giving you an audio signal. All well and good. The hum in your normal use of the guitar comes from the pickup coils moving through the ambient oscillating electromagnetic fields originating from the large amounts of current flowing at 60Hz through your walls - your AC electrical power (the magnets in the pickups don't have anything to do with this hum, they just let the strings generate a field of their own).

Now, if you wire one pickup backwards, you get the polarity reversed (the signal is upside down), which means that when you connect it to another one, the hum cancels out - but so does most of the audio signal (the different positions of the pickups means they have slightly different signals), giving you a very thin, weak sound.

So what you do is put the magnets in backwards, too, which means that the induced field from the strings vibrating has reversed polarity at that pickup. Then the polarity gets reversed again by the backwards windings, and you have a correct polarity audio signal and a reverse polarity hum signal. Combine this middle pickup with either of the other two, and the audio signals reinforce each other while the hum signals cancel out, giving you a fuller-than-one-pup-alone, hum-free sound in positions 2 and 4 (Yay physics!)

Jimmy

Edited February 25, 2005 by jnewman