Pickup Question

[deeboy]

I have an Ibanez that is a s-s-h configuration and I want to change my single coil pickups. Does the middle pickup need to be reverse wound?

[Narcissism]

I personally don't see why it would need to be. I've had lots of pickup configurations including HSH, HSS, SSS and HHH, and i've never heard of reverse winding... I wired all of these on my own as well (with diagrams of course), and they've all come out the way I wanted them to.

[axxion]

I have an Ibanez that is a s-s-h configuration and I want to change my single coil pickups. Does the middle pickup need to be reverse wound?

if you wanted to use the neck+middle sc's and have it be hum cancelling, then yes. That's exactly how the humbucker works (basically two sc's wired together, with one reversed). You'd still get output, you'd just have hum.

Do you use a five way switch? Or just three way?

If you use five way: When you select bridge+middle 1 of two things happens. Either you get full humbucker+middle or you have your guitar wired so that when you select bride+middle you coil tap the humbucker and add that to the neck. This is so that you still get hum cancellations. You can coiltap either the north or south coil of the humbucker. If you select this position and it is not hum cancelling, then you want to look at your diagram and tap the other coil. I'd highly recommend guitarelectronics.com for the schematics. Scroll down.. it's on the left side. It'll give you directions if the selection isn't hum cancelling.

If you use a three way: Well then this is a helluva lot easier. Your choices are either humbucker, middle, or neck. Then, it doesn't matter if any of the single coils are reverse wound at all.

[SwedishLuthier]

if you wanted to use the neck+middle sc's and have it be hum cancelling, then yes. That's exactly how the humbucker works (basically two sc's wired together, with one reversed). You'd still get output, you'd just have hum.

Yes and no. If you just reverse the wiring there will be an out of phase sound, very thin and with low output. The pickup has to be made for this. It is called a reverse wind, reverse pole, or RWRP, meaning both the wind is reversed (actually it is enought to reverse the "path to ground") and the magnetic poles are reversed. That way the string vibration is phase shifted twise (=back to normal) but the hum is only phase shifted once, thus canseled when added to the hum from the other SC.