Ibanez Pups And Wierd Cables...

[guitarmonky55]

so i was messing around with my ibanez s1620 and decided to try out some spare pickups in it that i had lying around. I opened it up to remove the bridge pickup and found a...3 conductor cable? it had ground, and a red and white wire that seemed to correspond to the individual coil wires like a regular 4 conductor has. so i went to put in a seymour duncan and found that it worked in teh same fashion as the stock pup when i soldered the black/green together and grounded them and then put red and white as they were on the switch before....why does ibanez make such retarded wiring?

[frank falbo]

Well, Paul Reed Smith uses shielded 3-conductor and I don't think he's retarded.

By the way, I don't have anyone mentally retarded in my family or anything, but I'm seeing that word used more often lately. I mean, are you retarded because it doesn't make sense to you?

Most of the time you're going to solder the two coils together. The only reason to separate them is parallel wiring or phase reversing within the coil. Neither is common although parallel neck pickup wiring is becoming more used. Otherwise both coils can still be accessed individually even when those are junctioned. What you did was to wire your pickup backwards, which is okay as long as it's in phase with the others. Really the red and white should have been soldered together, and green and black to hot and ground. But that's no big deal.

The only real complaint I have about Ibanez' 3-conductor (really 2-conductor) is that you can't reverse phase because the pickup input is also the cable's shield. So I've replaced those with 4-conductor several times just for that option, but shielded 3-conductor would've been fine too.

[guitarmonky55]

hmm that confuses me...you say i wired up backwards...the 5 way switch has a coil split position for the bridge and the only way i can achieve a coil split is by putting red and white on teh switch?

i peeled back the tape on the ibanez and it has a black and green wire, soldered together with the shield in there...

[frank falbo]

You're not really being coherent. It's hard for me to even tell if you're trying to say something contrary to what I said, so...

The standard way to wire a Duncan is red and white together, and black and green to hot and ground. You can reverse the black and green wires to reverse phase. It sounds like you joined the black and green wires together and you're using the red and white as hot and ground.

Are you saying that the other Ibanez pickup has black and green soldered together and red and white to hot and ground? I thought you said it had 2-conductor. Are you saying it had a 2-conductor cable spliced into it? Or did one of the pickups have 2-conductor and the other has 4-conductor? Anyway if your guitar works properly forget about it.

[guitarmonky55]

ok sorry for being confusing. let me start over and be clear.

the ibanez pickup, from the coils, underneath the tape, has the standard black/green/red/white and a shield. the black and green are soldered together right by the pickup, and soldered onto the bare shield in the cable. the red and white come out as normal in the cable. so basically the cable has a red, white, and a shield to ground.

when i opened up the guitar, the shield was soldered to the back of the volume pot and the red and white were both soldered to different positions on the switch. so when i went to wire up the duncan, i ended up having to wire the red and white to the switch and both the green and black together and to the back of the pot.

i found this whole configuration to be very odd, ive never run across anything like it before. my guitar works fine, everythings in phase and such, it just threw me off a little.

[frank falbo]

So what you're kind of saying is that the Ibanez had the same wiring as the Duncan inside the chassis of the pickup (under the tape) before it was soldered to the 2 conductor cable. Whereas the Duncan takes all 4 wires out of the pickup with the 4 conductor. So what I'm saying is that the standard way to wire the Duncan is red and white together, then green and black to hot/ground. So by switching those around, you reversed the phase of each coil of the humbucker, but then reversed phase again of the humbucker as a whole when you put the red and white one on the switch. Actually now that I think of it, you might be operating in single coil mode or something because either the red or white needs to go to ground, and the black/green junction is what goes to the switch on the coil tap side, to do the automatic coil tap. A pic of your wiring would be great.

If it were me, I would reverse the wires, so the red and white were together. That's the way the pickup was meant to be junctioned. Your way also works, though, because phase is like an even/odd equation. If you reverse phase twice, you're back to normal again. Does that make sense? So I would connect red and white, then bring that to the switch on the side that cuts the coil. Then take black to hot and green to ground. If that's out of phase with the other pickup, then reverse green and black.

But yes, I agree that 2- and 3-conductor cable is not as "standard" as 4-conductor and I think every double coil pickup (side by side or stacked) should have 4-conductor so I can decide what I want to do with it.

[guitarmonky55]

i tried flipping the wiring(black and green on switch and red and white connected) and when i do so, it operates the same except the coil tap feature position of the switch doesnt give a coil tap, its just a regular humbucker still. im not having any phasing probs or anything, so its working fine. i guess im gonna end up putting a new cable on teh ibanez because i want to use it in another guitar and i cant configure it how i want the way it is now.