Switched pups in my tele, now I got a problem

[Hound Dog61]

Awhile back the bridge pup on my tele quit working. The guitar is a nashville deluxe tele with the tex mex pups. I replaced the bridge pup with a seymour duncan jerry donahue signature after hearing good things about it on tgp. Ever since it sounds great except when I switch to the setting(#2) with both the bridge pup and middle pup. Now it sounds thin and you have to crank the guitar's volume knob to get it to sound the same. Can anyone help me with this? Is the seymour duncan pick up not matched or is it wired wrong? Before the original pup quit working every position was balanced.

 

[cc9cii]

Sounds like the pickups are out of phase with each other. Normally the neck pickups on teles have metal shields and the negative lead is soldered to the shield. These have 2 leads. If yours is one of these, you'll have to do some mods.

I think it is easier to mod the bridge pickup. Again, one of the leads are soldered to the base plate, it needs to be moved to the other. I'll see if I can dig up a diagram I did earlier.

 

[Hound Dog61]

I was wondering if maybe that was possible too given what I have heard about pups out of phase. But never having heard one I did not know.It only does it with the bridge and middle pickup not with the neck. The guitar has a strat pickup in the middle.

 

[cc9cii]

Hang on, that doesn't really make sense to me. So you have:

neck + middle = ok
middle + bridge = out of phase (thin)

correct? if so try the mod below to swap the ground wire on the pickup, then you need to reverse the bridge pickup wires at the switch/pot.

(ignore other parts of the diagram, just refer to the 'preparing the bridge pickup' section - in your case you don't need a new wire, you just need to connect it to the other yellow wire)

 

[walterw]

nice diagram!

this issue is why when installing tele bridge pickups with baseplates i always disconnect the plate from the pickup and run a separate bridge ground wire.

makes it easy to reverse the pickup without having to tear the whole thing apart.

(i wouldn't connect it to the other pickup wire, since there's a slight risk of a newbie solderer damaging the coil connection. just run another wire entirely for the bridge ground).

 

[Hound Dog61]

You are correct. All positions work awesome except for the middle and bridge position. Thanks for the diagram and the help

 

[Hound Dog61]

So Just finally got around to doing this today(just a tad bit of procrastination). Anyways after reading this and some other things, all I have to do is switch the wires on the pickup? Is it common for people to wire duncan pickups wrong when installing them?

 

[walterw]

Is it common for people to wire duncan pickups wrong when installing them?

no, it's annoyingly common for different brand pickups to be out of polarity with each other.