Incorrectly wired humbucker pickup.

When wired correctly, a humbucker has reversed magnets and reversed wiring to cancel hum while keeping your sound. If you wire both the coils in-phase with the reversed magnets, as someone has done here, you cancel the guitar sound and double the hum. The result is a weak, thin sounding guitar you can barely hear over the 50/60 cycle hum.

Wire colors don't always mean the same things when looking at different pickup brands.

[saldunlop]

THANKS THIS HELPED A TON i was worried my new 140 dollar pickup was busted

[BungCentra]

I’m having the same issue for a Les Paul studio I had picked up from a local pawn shop. I figured this was the issue. Time to buy a soldering iron

[PastelComGini]

No, they're not wired in parallel, they're wired in series, because the resistance doubled. But they're in the wrong phase, beefing the hum and killing the sound.

[TheSamurai]

Thanks a lot! I finally figured out why my humbuckers sounded good only in coil split. This really helped.

[michaelogden]

THANK YOU!!! I recently replaced the HB PUs on one of my guitars and thought it sounded great. BUT I prefer the neck pickup sound for what I usually do. Other than "yeah, it's working" after I installed the PUs, I haven't used the bridge PUs at all. This morning, I was messing with pedals and sounds and flipped to the bridge PU. Yikes!!! This was just the ticket!

[matt]

I'm glad you fixed your harp 😉 Good job 👍🎸🎵🎶

[argenteus]

Believe it or not, I actually looked this up to see if it was worth doing on purpose to create a unique sound. Not sure what I'd do with it now that I've heard it though; maybe with the right effects it could be cool, but it seems like a bit of a hassle to just get a tone that I could easily add by other means. Still, you never know until you look it up; distortion effects were first created by intentionally damaging your amp, so there may very well be all kinds of cool sounds you can get by wiring your guitar "wrong".

[geet]

nice! this helped a lot. got a dimarzio super distorion in a gibson les paul from way back thats just never seemed right. time to fix that.

[SplitRensonator]

Thanks super helpful for fixing my buzzy Les Paul!!!

[netrunner]

I did this on purpose. I used push/pull dpdt to be able to switch the phase of one of the coils in the humbucker to achieve out of phase with itself sound.

[brCharlieNagy]

Great video thanks. So the black plate of the pickup should be grounded, too, right ?

[blakegilliam]

Thanks great video can we get a couple more strings on the guitar?

[blakegilliam]

you know you're actually very smart and I'm having this problem on guitar so the ixnay my comment was but this is pretty needed my guitar is wired backers

[thomasfsr]

I would like to know how can I do that with my hot rails-ish pickup that has shown with the same malfunction. It only has one black cable with the 4 leads on it

[elpadrino]

Can this happen in both pickups? I built a guitar and a friend did the wiring for me, but now both humbuckers sounds really thin and trebley. Even with high gain they sound really weak

[Guitar]

I am going through a similar thing but it is a single conductor humbucker. It is humming and thin sounding. It still reads at a healthy 8.5k. Any ideas?

[MobileDecay]

If it wasn't soldered how was it wired? What he tape the wires? Lol.

[robertjones]

I've been playing guitar for a significant number of years but have no idea how they work. My bridge humbucker sounds knackered to me. Particularly when compared to the two single coil pickups closer to the neck, which sound much louder. And I can't really tell the difference between normal humbucker mode and single coil mode. I strongly suspect that this change happened when I took my guitar in to repair the volume pot, it's never sounded quite right since. It's an old Ibanez P540 though, so I'm not sure whether it's just suffering from old age. Any ideas on whether this could be a quick fix or will require testing with multimeter? Cheers.

[jeffsternon]

Hey man, nice video ! Btw, what's this guitar brand ? I can't tell... Thanks !

[SnehalA]

Hi I'd be grateful if you could shed some light on this. I have an HSH guitar. I replaced the the bridge pickup with a seymour duncan. The bridge position is significantly louder than the 4th position but it has also got hum. The 4th position has no hum and the output is less than the bridge. I don't understand what's causing the noise in the bridge position. Could it be a defective pickup or simply a wiring issue?