TheMODSQUAD
No, we’re not investigating the guitar sounds from the classic Blondie album, says Dave Burrluck, instead we’re shining a light on a largely overlooked way of wiring a humbucker
Back in the good ol’ days of the late 70s and early 80s, us keen modders were beginning to get the aftermarket parts our guitar-fantasies needed, not least pickups. Up to that point, unless you wanted to modify ahumbucker yourself, you were stuck with one sound: you’d wire the ‘hot’ output to your volume pot or switch, and wire the earth to the back of a pot. All good.
I don’t think Larry DiMarzio was the first person to offer up a different route, but in terms of my experience he certainly was, with the four-conductor hook-up cable. As each of the humbucker’s two coils has a start and finish wire (two coils, four conductors) it meant that, usefully, you could wire a humbucker’s two coils in different ways: standard series, voice either single coil by dumping the unwanted coil to ground, or wire the two coils in parallel, retaining the hum-cancelling nature (unlike the single coil option) but giving a slightly lower-output, more single-coil-type of sound. Armed with a mini-toggle switch or two, we now had access to more sounds from the same pickup. And, certainly back then, more was best!
But fast-forward to today and the vast majority of humbucking guitars might have a cursory coil-split, but it’s actually quite rare to find a parallel option on a production guitar. One exception is Mark Lettieri’s HSS PRS Fiore [pic 1] where the bridge humbucker has its own series/parallel switch. Another more recent example is on Manson’s rather good Verona Junior [pic 2], which uses a single volume control with a pull-switch to reconfigure the humbucker to parallel. Now, that isn’t rocket science, but it gives two very usable voices, both of which buck the hum, and the ears at Manson simply preferred the parallel option to the more usual single coil-split.
Testing that Manson guitar last issue was quite a revelation, or at least a reminder of the potential. With the switch down in series mode and a gain-y amp voice, the Manson Dirty Rascal pickup sounded huge; pull up the switch to parallel mode and it’s almost like a two-channel amp’s dirty ‐t o‐cleaner sound. Or if you set up your main rhythm sound in the parallel mode, the switch to series is a very effective thicker solo boost.
For any gigging guitarist, going parallel can be a gig-saver where you might need a single-coil-type sound on a song, but the proximity of lighting rigs and so on can turn your humuckers’
