Converting Burstbuckers to 4 conductor.

BigPaulie

As per the title.

I'm fairly handy with soldering having wired many guitars, amps and pedals over the years.

The videos on this conversion seem pretty straightforward.

Is there anything specific about modern Gibson HBs I should be considering?

andy_k

My only comment would be that 'modern' burstbuckers have tended to be more 'vintage' in construction, which will mean you might have to get right in to the coils to be able to add the 4 leads plus shield, which will involve possibly removing the tape from the coils, tricky to put back if you don't have the correct stuff.
Might be easier to buy something more modern from any of the other makers.

ICBM

What’s the intended purpose? You only need true 4-conductor wiring for series/parallel switching - if that’s not what you have in mind there may be a simpler way to achieve what you want without having to go as far into the pickups.

Bearing in mind that low-wound PAF-type humbuckers don’t usually split or parallel very well anyway.

Funkfingers

There is a fair bit of fiddly work involved. The changes will reduce the resale value of your pickup by more than the cost difference between selling your original pickup in unmolested condition and, then, purchasing a new 4-con + shield version of the same pickup.

As already pointed out, lower/vintage output humbuckers tend not to sound good split - except, possibly, in a HSH circuit.

normula1

It's no harder than any other. Just carefully remove the insulating tape on the pigtails and solder on the new wire. BBs split very well especially PRS style partial splits A split '61 is very good in the neck position

BigPaulie

Thanks for the replies, folks.

I'm looking to wire these up into 2 push/pull pots that will split either pickup and a 3rd pot which will reverse the phase of one of the pickups.

I think I'll pull the tape off and see oyf the are easily accessible tails for the South finish, North finish and North start. I'm assuming the South start tail will be soldered directly to the baseplate.

The reason I want to use these ones is that I really like the way they sound. I'd rather have a vintage type humbucker sound and a slightly unconvincing split sound than a hot/modern humbucker sound with a better single coil approximation.

normula1

I use multi-turn cermets to tune the partial split to what sounds best.