Electric Guitar wiring Diagram Book

[rrgguitarman]

Originally Posted by moon

It's easier than it looks.

When you wind a coil you get two wire ends: the start wire and the finish wire. Blue dots are coil start wires. Red squares are coil finishes (if you look closely you can see some coils are wound clockwise and some anti-clockwise).

The pickup magnet can be oriented in one of two ways - that's what the arrow represents.

Random electromagnetic radiation in the environment will generate a voltage in a coil. Thus, to make a humbucker buck hum, you want to connect the pickup wires in such a way that the voltages in each coil are reversed and so cancel each other out. If two coils are wound in the same direction, that means connecting them back-to-front: ie connecting the two finish wires together, or the two start wires.

Random EM is not influenced in any way by the pickup's magnet polarity. However the signal from the strings is. Steel strings vibrating in a magnetic field create a magnetic flux which generates a voltage in a coil. If you reverse the magnet polarity, you reverse the voltage. "In phase" means the voltages are in the same direction and sum together and "out of phase" means the voltages generated are in opposite directions and tend to cancel out (although not perfectly).

Thus, two coils can be connected to cancel out environmental EM - hum bucking - but NOT cancel out the signal from the strings if the magnets are oriented in the correct way.

When you wire up multiple pickups, the same principles apply. For simplicity, you can consider a two-coil humbucker as a single-coil when you're figuring out a wiring scheme.

That helps a bit. Thank you so much.