Three Cable Pickup to 2 Cable Pickup.

[Teratosis]

Hi,

 

I have a Ibanez RG 570. I attached the wiring diagram. The bridge humbucker is the pickup Im upgrading with a Dawgtown Huffbucker. The stock pickup has a 3 conducter cable, but the Dawgtown has a braided ground and a single conductor cable. I wanted to simply splice the huff to the old humbucker cable. Can I just twist the red and white together and connect to the huffbucker single conductor? Or should I just snip the red and connect the huffs conductor to the white cable?

 

On the pickup selector, the bridge position would be all the way to the right, which shows the white cable going there. Any help is appreciated in advance.

[WRGKMC]

The original pickups use coil tapping to get you different tones with the 5 way switch. Using a non tapping pickup is going to give you problems. Your selector may have a dead spot when selecting pickups.

 

You should not be tapping into the cable. You should remove the old pickup at the switch and save it in case you want to restore it back to factory conditions and run your new cable from the pickup to the switch. If you clip the cable off the old pickup you ruin that pickups value plus you can rind up with major yum issues splicing into it.

 

You would connect the new cable center wire where the red wire connected from the old pickup. The white wire connection wont be used. The ground is the same connection. Again this may cause a dead spot in the switch because you didn't buy the right kind of pickup.

 

I cant tell by that diagram exactly how the switching works. What I'd do is turn the guitar on then use the tip of a screwdriver and touch the poles and hear a click to find which coils are running for each switch position.

 

I suspect the guitar is wired as #1 position, HB Bridge > #2 Split Bridge/Middle> #3 Middle> #4 Middle/Split neck> #5 HB Neck.

 

With the new pickup you'd have #1 HB Bridge> #2 Middle> #3 Middle> #4 Middle/Split Neck> #5 HB Neck.

 

If you run the single wire to both connections on the switch, You should get #1 HB Bridge> #2 HB Bridge/ Middle> #3 Middle> #4 Middle/Split Neck> #5 HB Neck.

 

There will be no tapping and you'll likely have an impedance balance and possibly a phase issue in the #2 position. You can try it of course. You may even be able to run say a resistor or bleed cap from the Red connection on the switch to the White connection. The Resistor would give you a reduced signal from the bridge and balance the pickup with the center. I'd take half the DC resistance of the new pickup and use a resistor of that value. If the Pickup is 9K I'd use a 4.5K resistor between the red and white wire connection and drop the signal down to emulate a tapped signal so it matches the middle pickup better. You can also add a .01 ~.05uF cap over the resistor to give the signal some brighter spank is needed.

 

It would be better if the new pickup was tap-able.

 

You may still run into major issues. Guitars that use tapped coils usually have humbuckers with hotter wound coil so the single coils have a string enough signal. Not all Humbuckers with tapped coils sound good when tapped and they may sound awful with other non tap-able pickups. Ibanez chose specific pickups with specific impedances to get just the right balance when using the switch. They do use excellent pickups too so I'm not sure you are actually upgrading as much as you are down grading, Chances are very high, you're going to have an oddball config. Whether its good or not is questionable. It will be different but different isn't always better.

 

Again, I do suggest you don't clip the old wire off the pickup you're removing. In this kind of a setup the chances are extremely high you'll want to revert back to the stock pickup and wiring and that can be done easily if the old pickup is intact. .