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I have been wanting to change the pickups in my classic player hh jaguar. It may be a stupid question. I like the ability to roll the pickups from a humbucker to a single coil and all the tones in between. I'm curious if that is something that is in the wiring or in the pickups. Is there only a certain few pickups that will be able to do this? Would any 4 conductor pickup work like the ones it comes with? Has anyone changed them and found a pickup that they like more?

Thanks!

Should work with any four wire humbucker.

Oh great. I don't know if this is the same as a coil tap or not. I really like it when it falls in between a humbucker and a single coil. Thanks

Just switch the pickguard and fit in single coils . It should all work .

brandonwinmill wrote:Oh great. I don't know if this is the same as a coil tap or not. I really like it when it falls in between a humbucker and a single coil. Thanks

Coil split is where you wire a 4-conductor bucker to be selectable between one coil or both, works best with high-output pickups in my experience (or else the single coil sound is wimpy).
A coil tap is where a pickup is wired in the middle of the copper windings so you can take some of the windings out of the circuit with the flick of a switch, altering the tone and output. Much less common but loads of people refer to coil splits as coil taps for some reason.

split is more accurate, but as a former layman who called it a tap (because someone told me that's what it was), it made sense because you're tapping into a humbucker to get single coil sound. if you're not schooled enough to even be aware of how a true tap alters the output, the term fits well enough. but yeah, whenever anybody starts talking about one these days, i always ask for clarification.

That's a good point, objectively the term doesn't mismatch so much... I just wonder how it originally happened, perhaps at a time certain manufacturers were offering both along with series/parallel switching and active stuff, people just got everything mixed up.

Yeah, i'm totally mixed up. Is there another guitar that has the roll function that my jag has? I thought that the roller on each pickup changed the amount of "power" each pickup was putting out. I figured that as you rolled it it started limiting the output of one of the coils until it was only allowing one coil on. This is probably totally wrong. I just want it to have the same function but with different pickups if thats possible.

Thanks for the clarification!

i'm sure there's another guitar made out there with a similar control, but it is pretty rare to see it come stock on an instrument (afaik anyway). as to what it is specifically doing to the signal, i am not sure. it could be doing either (a tap or a split), and probably the easiest way to tell is to plug it in, crank the gain and gently tap the pole pieces with a screw driver on each coil with the knob turned all the way in one direction and then the other. if you get clicking sound from both coils in both directions, then you probably have a tap. if you only hear the click from one coil in a particular direction, it is likely a split.

there's my very inelegant but tried 'n true pickup testing methodology.

brandonwinmill wrote:Yeah, i'm totally mixed up. Is there another guitar that has the roll function that my jag has? I thought that the roller on each pickup changed the amount of "power" each pickup was putting out. I figured that as you rolled it it started limiting the output of one of the coils until it was only allowing one coil on. This is probably totally wrong. I just want it to have the same function but with different pickups if thats possible.

Thanks for the clarification!

It's what Seymour-Duncan calls a Spin-a-Split control. I don't know of any major brand guitar that has it stock other than the HH CP Jaguar. Clever little feature. It's definitely a Spin-a-Split, not a Dial-a-Tap (a similar feature but for a coil tap), on the Jaguar. It's like a volume knob just for the second coil. When open all the way, it's a full humbucker, and when closed all the way, it's a single coil. Any 4-conductor (or 3) pickup can do this.



It's also a great feature for an HSS Strat with three knobs.

honeyiscool wrote:It's also a great feature for an HSS Strat with three knobs.

Clever. I'd like to try that on a Strat.

Ok. Thank ya'll very much. This is the first time it has been explained and it actually makes sense. Now i need to find some replacement pickups and see what happens.

honeyiscool wrote:Spin-a-Split. . . Dial-a-Tap

love the phrasing on each! anybody ever used the latter? seems to me one would need to be a fairly dedicated tone-snob to require that much range in a tap. the split seems much more useful in this way.



and thanks for confirming the rarity of S-a-S coming stock. i don't suppose there are any D-a-T's rolling off any assembly lines?

I've never done a Dial-a-Tap but something tells me that putting it on a spinner would change the response of the pickup, as does a Spin-a-Split, too (very minor amount, and you could get a 1 meg pot), but I think it'd be more noticeable in a coil tap.

I've wired two guitars with Spin-a-Splits but funny enough, neither actually had humbuckers. The first was a Strat. Since I don't like three pickup guitars, I had the middle pickup and bridge pickups wired together in series as a humbucker, with a Spin-a-Split to spin the middle pickup in and out. It was quite interesting, actually. Gets a very Brian May type sound.

The other was an Ibanez J-style bass in which the guy wanted more fatness from the pickups. Meanwhile, he didn't ever really use the neck pickup by itself. Also, he didn't want to spend any money. So what I did it I basically wired the pickups in series to make a humbucker with the neck pickup on a Spin-a-Split pot. So that way, open fully, it was a very fat sound, and closed, it was a J-bass bridge pickup sound, and you could have the range of sounds. It sounded best about 7 or 8.

Wow. That is amazing. I especially like the rolling in the pickup on a strat. Very intelligent.