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Make your dual-humbucker guitar sound like a Tele in 2 minutes.

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#1 ·
I came across this great post by my friend Bob Martin:



Just came across this doing a Google search for "humbucking pickups that sound closest to a single coil." This is a simple mod that you can do to your humbucking-equipped guitar in about 2 minutes. Essentially, you remove the screw pole pieces. This takes the primary coil and makes it a dummy coil leaving the other coil to pick up the string vibration. Most importantly - IT WORKS! Doesn't cost a cent. Can be undone in seconds.

I bought a PRS Mira X from SoundSource Rochester about a year ago. The pickups in it are very hot and it's much more of a rock sound than I use. But the guitar feels and plays great. I had GFS Memphis pickups in it, but they didn't really cut it. So I put the Miras back in. And put the guitar away.

Anyway, back to the story. I came across a post on the Strat-Talk forum. In it, this fellow demonstrates the difference in tone. YES! Just what I was looking for! While the guitar doesn't sound like a Tele or Strat, it gets close. I am sure other pickups would have different results.

I now have twang instead of that darker, muddier sound you usually get with Humbuckers. And all I had to do was remove 12 screws I can put back in whenever I want to.

I'll live with the sound for a bit and tweak it - but man, it's sounding great to me right now.

Some folks have said this is the same as a coil tap. It may yield the same results as a coil tap - I am not sure. I believe most guitars I've had that said they were coil tapped were probably coil split, where you kill the second coil and have a real single coil vs a coil tap where you take away some of the windings to reduce the output of a single coil.

Here's the video from a fellow named Scott Rose Grove. It's entertaining and fun to watch. In 50 years of playing guitar, I've never even considered this or seen it done. BUT IT WORKS PERFECTLY. You just get locked into the twangier sound until you decide to put the screws back in!

Here you go!
And our favourite gear guy, Scott Grove, has done videos on it:





Bob replaced his pole pieces with #5-40 nylon screws so he doesn't have empty holes in his pickups. Very cool, totally reversible, and silent.
 
#3 ·
That is correct. :agreed:

And as suggested in the second video, if you have pickups that have two rows of adjustable poles, you can take out the bridge-side ones under the bass strings and the neck-side ones on the treble strings to simulate an angled pickup in the bridge position.
 
#7 ·
That was actually my first thought, too - what would happen if you removed part but not all of the pickups' polepieces. Potentially you could get some pretty interesting sounds, not only just by doing that, but by something like

*___
___*
*___
___*
*___
___*

...which would simulate a singlecoil with a very wide stagger, or even

*__*
*__*
*__*
___*
___*
___*

...which would basically be a humbucker on the treble strings and a singlecoil on the bass. Any reason that wouldn't work?
 
#9 ·
Gave it a try on my Ibanez RG470! This one has the Dimarzio Super 2 in the bridge. Playing through my Kemper Profiler... i'd say it gets pretty dang close! Especially considering what kind of guitar and pickup i started with... i bet messing with the pot values makes a big difference too. I removed the back 3 poles on the bass strings, and the front 3 on the high strings to give me a slanted pickup sound. Enjoy!
 
#15 ·
Works great on my RGs with the Evolution hex screws, removed the ones from the bridge side coil of the neck pickup.

Not only does it sound like a single coil, but it's noise cancelling because the adjacent coil acts the way the dead coil of a stacked single coil does.

Now I can have single coil singing tone from an Evo and still have noise cancelling advantages of a 'bucker...and it does not suck tone like so many stacked SC pups.
 
#30 ·
I don't know if somebody already said it so...

Boss GT10 has an amazing pickups simulator, it's awesome cause it really works.
You can change some different types of pickups like hum/single/acoustic/piezzo.
Believe me my guitars hums sounded like a strat single when I needed a clean chorused tone.The acoustic sounded like an acoustic guitar and the piezzo one sounded like Petrucci's piezzo tone.
Guys in USA can get an used one for about 150/200 and gett the best boss pedals + better amps than pods(IMHO) and everything programmable + that pickups simulator which saved my ass cause I play with cover bands(from pop to metal) so I need to simulate a gazillion different tones, from a pristine strat clean to metal from hell :lol:
Take a look on GT10, at least go to a store and try that pickup simulator with a guitar with hums and another one with singles ;)
 
#32 ·
Since this just got bumped, I figured I'd report some findings - I just picked up a Yamaha RGX420 (The Drop 6 model - 26.5" scale) the other day, and one of the settings on the 5 way is to get the neck facing coil of the bridge pickup with the bridge facing coil turned off, and it does this sound very convincingly!
 
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