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Do I need 2 conductor or 4 conductor pickups?


ESchmidt

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Het everyone. Im replacing the pickups in my Heritage Les Paul. I can either get the pickups in 2 conductor or 4 conductor. Im not sure what this means so can someone please explain? Any help would be appreciated. Im a noob to pickup swapping. Thanks!

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2 conductor pickups will only allow a standard installation. Humbuckers on all the time. Depending how the 2 wire lead is set up, you may be able to wire a phase switch.

 

4 conductor wiring will allow almost any wiring scheme you can think of. Series/parallel, coil tapping, phase reversal, etc. Depending on how it's wired, you may be able to use some of these sounds at the same time.

 

Spend some time going through the Seymour Duncan wiring diagrams site.

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The four conductor wire is generally used for humbucker coil tapping/splitting, which can isolate each coil of a humbucker, essentially making it into a single coil pickup ala Tele or Strat. In some cases both coils of each humbucker can be used to obtain varying degrees of a single coil sound.

 

If your intent is just to replace your existing non-coil split/tapped humbuckers, then the 2 wire versions will work just fine. However, you can use the 4 wire versions for that application if you might want to coil/tap split in the future.

 

Pay close attention to the wiring diagrams supplied with the pickups, be careful and neat, and you shouldn't have any problems. Since you're a noob at this sort of thing, keep it simple and get the 2-wire versions and go from there. In the future you can get more complicated as you gain experience.

 

Good luck!

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