Dummy Coil?

[cole]

So I'm planning on putting a Dummy coil in my Strat. I know the results of putting one in, change in tone and so forth. What I was wondering was, I know the dummy coil is supposed to match the pickups but would it work for three single coils if I took all the readings of my pickups and found the average and wound a coil to match that?

[Jester700]

The short answer is: sure. It won't work quite as well as an exact match, but it'll work. RWRP pickups don't always match exactly, but they work - the same concept hold true for "mismatched" humbucker coils like DiMarzio's dual resonance models.

Note that you need all 3 normal pickups the same for this - no RWRP middle. And with THAT setup, position 2&4 will always have hum - they won't cancel on their own, and the dummy WILL be a poor matchin this setting.

Tech stuff:

A dummy doesn't really have to match the pickup. There's an equation to make the noise sensed the same for good cancellation, but I forget the details. I THINK it's total area enclosed by the coil. IOW, you could use a 3" round coil as a dummy coil that uses a LOT fewer turns of wire because the area's so much larger. This will suck MUCH less tone because the inductance would be very low.

[Mike Sulzer]

I second Jester, but just add that the easiest way to make the dummy is as much like the pickup as possible, especially for a "one of a kind" project where the "engineering time" to design a different dummy could get pretty large.

[JohnH]

So how do you wire the dummy coil? I would expect that it would go in series with the others, say between the pups and the volume control. Then, assuming the pups are wired normally, with paralel combos, it should do a fairly good job of cancelling noise in all positions. But how are these coils normally connected?

John

[Mike Sulzer]

So how do you wire the dummy coil? I would expect that it would go in series with the others, say between the pups and the volume control. Then, assuming the pups are wired normally, with paralel combos, it should do a fairly good job of cancelling noise in all positions. But how are these coils normally connected?

John

John, series, as you say. But you need to be carefull with more than one pickup. For example, the Gibson Blueshawk uses a dummy in series with either selected single pickup, but switches out the dummy when using both pickups and instead uses the pickups RWRP.