adding parallel or phase switching?

axisus

Either of them worth it?

I was going for all singing all dancing wiring on my main guitar, but I have decided that it is just too much going on for my simple brain, so I have opted for something more intuitive that I don't need to think about! Having said that, I have a push/pull tone pot in the guitar that is currently not doing anything. I was wondering whether to try and put in either parallel or phase switching?

My impression is that they probably both sound a bit weedy so I'm not sure whether to bother. Anyone got an opinion? Or seen a good YouTube demo video - I looked at a few but gave up there!

octatonic

I've tried parallel and reverse phase switching before.

Is this a dual humbucker guitar you're doing it in?

In the end I go back to a coil cut for hum buckers- I use it so rarely and it is simpler to wire up.

I've come to really dislike the sound of a humbucker wired parallel- it is all so 'blah'.

In a HSS I like using the spare pot for 'add bridge' in positions 3-5 and find it most useful in position 5 (neck pickup).

Roland

octatonic said:

I've tried parallel and reverse phase switching before.

Is this a dual humbucker guitar you're doing it in?

In the end I go back to a coil cut for hum buckers- I use it so rarely and it is simpler to wire up.

I've come to really dislike the sound of a humbucker wired parallel- it is all so 'blah'.

Same experience here. Pickup tapping is worth while, but parallel coils and out of phase pickups sound bland to my ear.

chrisj1602

I've got a coil splitable bridge and out of phase on my R7, I find them useful and it takes nothing away, you still have the usual LP sounds.

axisus

Actually I have put a couple of SD P-rails in, but I'm using toggle switches instead of the triple ring things. I tried the triple rings but I could never get my head around where I was with them, and my eyesight is such that I couldn't tell looking at those tiny switches either! Add to the fact that they looked ugly!

The real reason is that it would be nice to get the two rails as 'stratty' sounding as possible, and I was wondering whether parallel or phase might nudge them a bit closer. Probably not, I have no idea???

chrisj1602

When my bridge pickup is split and out of phase with the neck humbucker I think it sounds a quite like the bridge and middle of a Strat.

ICBM

With a single push-pull you can only switch one pickup to parallel, if that helps... if you do want to do that, I think it sounds better on a neck pickup. But I second what's already been said - parallel wiring a single humbucker generally sounds weak and bland to me - it doesn't have the character that a plain coil split has, and the only advantage is that it's hum cancelling*. (It can sound good on a bass though, for some reason!) I don't like phase switching usually either, it sounds thin and honky, and is too quiet. It does have its fans, though.

So I would go back to a simple coil split for both pickups as being the most useful.

*This may not apply to the P-Rails, since the coils are so mismatched that the sound in parallel is going to be very different from a standard HB in parallel - I haven't tried them myself yet, but I think the idea is also that the two rail coils are supposed to sound a bit Stratty - a lot of people find they sound thin and weak though.

DanielT

Parallel wiring was for me a bit too subtle to be worth the effort.

Phase switching is only worth it if you can find a way to balance up the pickups. Fully out of phase can be a bit too much. Having a way to balance volumes is definitely needed (on my guitar is single volume, single tone, so I have to use coil taps to balance things up).

What about half-out-of-phase wirings? Its a popular way to wire a tele... but I have no experience of what it feels like to play.