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Did some work on my Rickenbacker 4004Cii last night.


isaac42

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Rehearsal was canceled, so I had some free time.

 

Some time back, I noticed that the bridge pickup sounded really thin. A few weeks ago, I opened the bass up and found that the pickup was open. Turned out to be one coil of the series humbucker, so I wired it for single coil, and it sounded a lot better.

 

I noticed, however, that the neck HB was a lot louder than the bridge SC. Last night, I decided to wire the neck pickup in parallel. I also had a 500K pot with a switch handy, so I used the switch to allow both parallel HB and SC operation. Wired it all up, and it didn't work. Checked all my wiring, and found that I had wired the new pot backwards. Fixed that, and tried it again. Worked great! The bass is much brighter now, with the 500K pot. In fact, the original pot, which should have been 330K, measured under 200K. Same with the tone pot.

 

The odd thing is that I couldn't hear any difference between HB and SC operation. So here's what I'm thinking. Two virtually identical pickups (the two coils of the HB) in almost exactly the same position on the bass really ought to sound almost exactly the same. In parallel, the output impedance is lowered, but the output voltages don't add together as they do in series. So I guess it makes sense that it sounds the same either way. Still, it should be a useful mod. In SC mode, the two pickups form a HB pair. When the neck pickup is soloed, I can put it into HB mode by itself.

 

Anyway, I'm looking forward to trying it out in rehearsal and at a gig.

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  • 3 weeks later...
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Still no perceptible difference in tone between single coil and humbucking with the neck pickup. Tonal balance is good, with useful differences between the pickups and the two combined, but nothing extreme. Down the line, I think I'll still switch out the pickups, putting the humbucker in the bridge postion and wiring it for series operation. That should give me a couple more tonal possibilities.

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Quick review: the bridge pickup didn't work, found that one coil was open, wired the good coil for single coil (SC) operation, works. Neck pickup was much louder, so wired it in parallel instead of series, lower output, better match with the SC bridge pickup. Took out the 330K pot and replaced it with a 500K pot with a push-pull switch wired so that I can select SC or parallel humbucking (HB) operation.

 

I suspect that the pickups are stacked humbuckers, and that the functional coil on the bridge pickup is the bottom coil, and that its output is therefore lower. If that's so, then it will work better in the neck position than in the bridge position. The fully functional HB pickup will work well in the bridge position, so switching them out is the next step. Really, I don't think anything strange is going on.

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If it was me, I'd probably have the bridge pickup rewound... lots of pickup builders offer that service. If it is indeed a stacked humbucker, losing one of the coils (and running it as a single coil) would typically lower the output level, regardless of which coil it was. A decent rewind should make it as good as new, and probably for a lot less than a replacement Ric pickup would cost you.

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Probably true, Phil, But you must understand one thing: I'm cheap. Really, really cheap!

 

In the meantime, I used it again last night, and in a different venue, with a different speaker cabinet, it worked really well. The bridge pickup by itself sounded quite good, and I didn't have any balance issues switching between it and both in parallel. So maybe it was the acoustics of the room, or maybe the cabinet. In the meantime, it's working well, so we'll see.

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I'm all for bang-for-the-bucks, if not outright cheap myself... ;) Maybe that's a project you might want to learn to tackle yourself at some point? 42-43 gauge wire can't be all that expensive, and I'm sure there are tutorials for pickup winding on the web. I's working now, so it's probably not something you need to do urgently, but it might make for a fun project at some point. I'd love to see pics and a write-up if you ever do decide to give it a go. :idea::)

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