how to wire pup

[standingdeer]

Quote

I have pickups with 5 wires, bare, white,red, green and black. I want to wire these into an LP
type guitar. Advise please.

 

[isaac42]

The bare wire is the ground wire, so that's easy.

The simplest and most common way to wire a humbucking pickup is with the two coils in series. Seymour Duncan uses those colors, so I'll assume that what you have is the same. In that case, you'd use the black wire as the hot lead, green as neutral. Red and white go together, taped off so that they don't touch anything else.

There are other things you can do, of course. There six ways you can wire the two coils, but in my opinion only three are useful, those being both coils in series, both coils in parallel, and one coil by itself.

Probably the most common option is to "coil split". What that means is to short out one coil, so that you're using only one coil, essentially making it a single coil pickup. Here's a diagram showing one way to do that.