How to identify ground and hot in a pick up

[scorpionscar]

I have a blade strato style guitar with Levinson pups. They have a grid (ground, in the picture=black cause was too short and I had to solder a black one), white and red wires. Does anyone tell me the color code? I think the red=hot and white goes soldered toguether with the grid to ground but not sure. Any ideas or how to identify them with the multimeter (Not very experienced using the multimeter for this purpose..)

 

 

Scorpionscar

[curtisa]

In your second picture I think I can just make out the two copper strands of the pickup winding(s) wrapping around the outside of the base plate from the ends of the red and white wires. Without knowing what kind of pickup this is meant to be (stacked humbucker? mini humbucker? single coil? some unusual shielded thing?) it's impossible to say what each wire does just by looking.

I guess you could use a multimeter and measure ohms for each possible combination of the three wires. You might find that you get two combinations where the resistance readings are equal and one where the resistance reading is double the other two? That might suggest that the pickup is some kind of humbucker. One wire may also be connected to that copper strip that appears to be underneath the base on the pickup in the background of the first picture, which could be grounded for shielding purposes? Dunno. Just speculating now...

Are the other pickups already connected inside the guitar? Can you just copy what is already there?

Probably the most reliable thing to do would be to ask Blade directly for assistance. There appears to be an email contact on their website.

[mistermikev]

looking at the blade site... these are supposed to be hum cancelling pickups.  as such... my guess is there are two coils in there.  looking at some gutshots from a few blade texas guitars... it looks like they use a fairly std wiring.  looks like red and white go together to make the series link... black goes to live... green (and bare if there is one) go to ground.  wire it up like this, and put your red/positive lead from a multimeter to the black... and black/negative lead to green/bare.  I'm guessing you'll get in the 7-12k reading range using the ohm setting on your multimeter.  (ohm setting should have a little picture that kid of looks like an "a" or a girls hair with curls if you will).

now... assuming that works out... then clip the red/white wires to ground along with the green/bare wires and test again - should get about half of what you had before (this is if I have any idea what I'm doing... which seems unlikely).

[mistermikev]

btw... this is/was what I'm looking at for reference: http://lh5.ggpht.com/_Er7htD-vbt4/S0NSRfPMXwI/AAAAAAAAAN8/ThmYxGVFNaQ/s640/IMG_2484.JPG

[mistermikev]

looking at this pic from their website tho... it looks an awful lot like they are using green for live, and black/bare for ground.  red white together for series.