Coil-Tap Taper?

[MetalGuitard]

As most of you know grounding two of the four wires splits the coils. I was wondering, what would happen if you used a volume pot, for example, in place of a toggle? Would you pan from a full humbucker sound to a coil-tap or are you just gonna get a weaker humbucker sound and a that has a variable degree of yuck?

I was thinking of using on of those no-load pots fwiw.

Anyone ever tried this?

[RvChevron]

Originally Posted by MetalGuitard

As most of you know grounding two of the four wires splits the coils. I was wondering, what would happen if you used a volume pot, for example, in place of a toggle? Would you pan from a full humbucker sound to a coil-tap or are you just gonna get a weaker humbucker sound and a that has a variable degree of yuck?

I was thinking of using on of those no-load pots fwiw.

Anyone ever tried this?

]

Yes it will work and particularly well with a no load.

[has-sound]

SD has a diagram on his website:

http://www.seymourduncan.com/support...tic=1h_1v_1sas

[David Collins]

I would be inclined to use a very low value pot - in the 25 to 50kΩ range, and cut the ring to make it a no-load. A high value pot wouldn't cut any noticeable amount of the signal until you reached near the bottom. Even then, for me I just don't think I'd ever have a need for an in-between full and tapped sound, or use for a fade from one to the other. Everyone's needs differ of course, but for me it more likely be a seemingly cool feature that never actually got used.

[MetalGuitard]

Thanks for the info guys. I hadn't ever seen this concept on the web so I thought maybe it was some guitarded concept I hashed on my own because no one else was dumb enough to do it. I can totally see the potential for this to be one of those novelty wiring tricks that never sees real use. I guess I'm at least curious enough to try it though.

I didn't realize SD had so many wiring diags on their site. I remember going there months ago maybe I didn't under stand their drop-down menus but all I could seem to find then was the standard stuff. I'll have to check them all out!

I tried to make a no-load pot out of a 500k CTS and I'm not sure how much of the carbon strip you're supposed to cut but I went all the way to the phenolic under the ring. I severed it completely. To make it worse, I gorrilla fisted the pliers re-sealing the tabs and pushed in the bottom of the pot and it doesn't spin as well now.

Mr Collins, regarding your inclination to use a 25-50k pot, are you thinking that with a 250-500k pot the sweep would be too long and not go far enough to give it the fully shunted sound of a switched coil-tap? I think, only because I've never tried this, that I'd like to go from Full HB sound down to standard coil-tapped sound. I'm thinking though that using a pot will mean I'll never get that fully shunted sound. Am I on track at all with this?

[Carbohydrates]

The Classic Player HH Jaguar uses the thumbwheel pots on the upper plate as tapers between single coil and humbucker for the pickups. Give one of those a try and see how you like it.

[David Collins]

Originally Posted by MetalGuitard

Mr Collins, regarding your inclination to use a 25-50k pot, are you thinking that with a 250-500k pot the sweep would be too long and not go far enough to give it the fully shunted sound of a switched coil-tap? I think, only because I've never tried this, that I'd like to go from Full HB sound down to standard coil-tapped sound. I'm thinking though that using a pot will mean I'll never get that fully shunted sound. Am I on track at all with this?

"Mr.Collins" - I love it!

On a traditional volume pot you're using both sides to cut the signal - increasing the resistance from pickup to jack, while decreasing the resistance from pickup to ground on the other end of the ring. You can't do that in a coil tap, because you wouldn't be able to use a no-load pot in that fashion, and if you didn't use a no-load pot, you would be loading the second coil and perhaps sacrificing something from the full humbucker sound. In any case, that wiring style in a coil tap would be senselessly complicated (unless you're splitting a humbucker wired parallel, but I'm assuming we're talking series here).

For a coil tap, you'll just want to short center leads to either hot or ground, depending on which coil you want want to cut out. You're only using one side of the pot remember, not both. If you had a 500 or 250kΩ pot you wouldn't hear much significant change until you got probably somewhere around 4. Since we're not increasing resistance between source and output on the other side (which accounts for most of the volume change in the upper end of a traditional volume), we are only relying on the shorting out of the coil to change the volume. In this case, panning in the resistance range above 25-50kΩ you'll find some change in the tone of a coil (which wouldn't be so noticeable in this application) and not really that much in the actual output of the coil.

In short, if you want the fade to be spread more evenly through the turn of the knob, you'll have to start with a lower resistance. Then in order to avoid changing the tone of the full humbucker when it's on 10, you have to cut the ring and make it a no load. Personally, I'd get a 25kΩ audio pot and start from there. If there was too sudden of a change between 10 and 9 (where the wiper meets the active portion of the cut ring), I might move up toward 50kΩ, but I doubt it would go higher than that.