In Praise of the Coil Tap

The push pull is on the tone knob, which taps both humbuckers putting them into single coil mode. The way the Duncan pickups work is that they have four lines out and when you pull that switch up, it only uses the front coil (I think) of the pickup making it a single coil. It is the vanilla coil tap set up, but it is still pretty cool. You get to go from having three basic pickup sound setups on a guitar to six, which raises the possiblities. I did not have a guitar with a single coil pickups, so this helped out.

I think having some good quality pots have greatly improved the sound of the guitar. It sounds like someone took a blanket off of the speaker.

Depending on how the pickup is wired and set up, you can get into all sorts of esoteric things like choosing which individual coil will be used and changing the phase arrangement. I'm pretty much just starting to pick some of this stuff up.

"Split" and "tap" in this context mean the same thing everywhere I've ever read or heard about it.

Parallel pickup wiring is pretty uncommon though it can be really cool. All the Danelectros use it. I have a 6 string Dano Mod which is an SSH configuration (they made the humbucker out of two lipstick pickups!) and has a 6 position switch that gives each of the three pick ups as well as every combination of 2 (i.e. front+back, front+mid, mid+back). All of the combinations of 2 are roughly twice as loud as the single pickup settings because they are wired in parallel. (There's a coil tap on that humbucker too, incidentally.)

Dano adds another small switch that actually turns on all three pickups at once. There's an almost absurd change in volume going from one pickup to all three in parallel, but I love the fact that I can use it to overdrive an amp without a pedal.

What wiring options are you confused by/interested in?

Ah, I was so much younger then, I'm older than that now.

I've got a few burn scars from wiring pickups.

Coolest weird thing I have is an old 1977 Ibanez bolt-on Les Paul copy with three of their "super 70s pickups". Guys at RS guitarworks set me up and I now have it wired with the middle pickup on a dip switch that will turn it on and off with a standard Les Paul switching. The pickups are pretty low output for humbuckers but you get these really cool kind of out of phase setup with the middle pickup and with it flipped on it is all three pickups. Totally bonkers guitar with a thin ass neck, but it's cool for recording. It definitely has some different sounds built in with current wiring.

Oh yeah the guitar had at one point in the 70s or 80s been rewired using the cabling out of an old lamp, that molded crimped looking stuff. There is a thin line between being desperate and being stupid.

Years ago on one of my early guitar builds, instead of soldering the components, I connected them together using a terminal block. In theory this meant that I could easily change the wiring whenever I wanted, but in practice the wires kept falling out and breaking off in use, making the guitar incredibly unreliable.