Bass Guitar Wiring

[Fraser Welsh]

Hi all, just a quick question...

I picked up a cheap bass guitar at a car boot sale, which has several broken connections, which I'm trying to sort out, I can cope with wiring the pots, put the pickup (looks like a single coil, but I might be wrong) has three wires, red, white and blue and all scematics for similar guitars ( 1 pickup, vol & tone) show only two wires, so where do should the wires go?

Cheers...

[AG...]

Right, this is probably gonna act more as a bump so the bigger guys can answer properly but here goes.

As far as I know, there are two different types of 3 conductor wire pickups;

Tappable single coils, where the third conductor separates the pickup into a shorter wound coil, giving a different output and tone

Humbuckers, where the North-Coil end wire and South-Coil start (usually wired together for series humbucking) wires are combined into one wire and sent out of the pickup, tapping the pickup to one coil when connected to ground.

I don't know how you would go about finding out which of these it is, or which colour is which conductor. Is there a brand on the pickup? Here is how you would wire it up using a SPDT switch to utilise both sounds of the pickup, for those two scenarios. If you wanted just one sound from the pickup, use the main coil wire or hot wire only, going to the switch or pot, tape of over the extra wire and leave it.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v86/lala...lalala/bass.jpg

Edited January 6, 2006 by AG...

[Fraser Welsh]

Cheers for that, the problem is the guitar dosen't have any switches at all, though I guess it could be a non-original pickup, I'll give it a try anyway...

Thanks for your help.

[Fraser Welsh]

Anyone have any ideas about which color is likely to be which?

[gripper]

I would ohmeter the leads to each other and to the case of the pickup. The blue may be ground as it is allowed to be in some European portable cordage. Tell us what readings you get.