It's ground because the last layer of winding acts like a shielding when you connect finish to ground, other wise it will work but it will be very noisy
It is a neutral, and the source is the pickup. AC power transmission uses three separate live conductors phased 120 degrees apart and a common neutral to minimize power loss by adding positive and negative currents.
@@georgoroth The last layer of winding does not act as a shield. Pickups are noisy, which is why humbuckers were invented. They use two coils with magnets in opposite orientation, as you can see in the illustration, so their signals are opposite in polarity but the the noise produced by interference is the same in both. By connecting them so that the signals add together the noise is cancelled.
@@nightjaronthegate I'm an electronics technician, i build pickups and guitars for a living since 20 years ago, i known exactly how this works and why humbuckers where invented, single coils are always noisy but they get a little bit less noisy when the last layer acts a little bit like a shield, that's why they always connect the last layer to ground
It’s made so you follow the polarity for the position the pickup should be mounted as, it would’t really matter which one you choose as “the signal cable” but it’s to have polarity consistency with the other pickups on your guitar
I mean you could flip the hot and ground and it would still work. And the number of conductors or wires that is usually used to describe a pickup is simply how many were soldered on after winding. Hot and ground only exists in the context of the circuit but start and finish is describing the ends specifically.
The only thing that matters is that all pickups on the guitar is soldered the same way. If not you get phase problems like signal loss when two are «on» at the same time. If so, you have to swap the leads on one of them.🤘🤘
It can matter for phasing and if an end is referenced to something else in the circuit including say a conductive part of the pickup. As a pickup winding by itself there is no hot neutral or ground. It does have a polarity or phase response.
Kinda like how the two hot wires coming from the pole transformer into your house are just two ends of a single wire that is the secondary winding of the transformer.
Yeah I just learned that a few weeks ago Watching the guy who works in the hydro plant And if I remember correctly the neutral is in the middle That really did blow my mind
It wouldn't fit and would be rather quiet. You need lots of turns since that's what makes the signal. The current in the wire is extremely small so light guage wire can handle that just fine and allow space for thousands (sometimes) of turns.
I just call everything plus or minus, + or -, it makes everything a lot simpler, It works the same way whether you're wiring a guitar or a house, even works in plumbing for central heating systems,
This is AC so there is no fixed plus or minus, only live and neutral. The purpose of a pickup is to produce an alternating voltage. Batteries have + and - because they are DC but houses use AC. Don't try to do any work on your home wiring.
But wire colors on houses and auto are different. So u would have to know the colors just to use plus or minus so really using colors to make ur nonsense system
they do when you pay for a pickup you are also paying for all the bad ones to get to that good one. The better the person and more consistent the wire is the more that is profit versus loss, but you have to keep that in your calculation otherwise you would lose money.
It’s not polar. You can wire it either way and it works. This is because you have no earth ground just hot and common which are paths in and out of the power source. This makes polarity irrelevant.
Both of your questions have been covered on RU-vid and the internet. Good luck hunting it down. But I believe the two options is what leads to either in- phase or out-of-phase pickups depending on which way you solder.
Let me try that again: more simply put, it IS polar, but not like your car battery. Or any battery. The difference is in the sound output, and I've been assuming a 2-pickup guitar. If you were to reverse the wires on either one, they end up out of phase with each other.
From what i understand, only when two pickups or both coils of a humbucker are working simultaneously. They need to be reverse wound and reverse polarity so they don't phase each other out. Not an electrician. Im sure someone has a more precise answer
A coil can be a source of power in a magnetic field. But in this case, the coil is a load and all loads have at least two sides of line each requiring a separate wire. This coil will sit attached to A source of power and a destination where that power wants to go. The coil will become that connection and will oscillate the movement of power by the strings, interrupting the magnetic wave created by the coil.
So it doesn't really matter which positive or negative if only have one pup? You need to know which is which with multiple pus so they are in phase? No?
And you have to know which one is the start and finish and the polarity of the magnet so you can wire them as a humbucker You can have multiple humbucker configurations with single coils and a selector switch
Yes because in theory the circuit needs to be closed. Meaning it needs to look back to a ground. A ground wire is never counted because it's for grounding. It's not that hard to look at wiring diagrams and figure it out. Even as someone that's colorblind I can still see them. It's because people doing this don't understand how electricity works.
Here’s a good rule of thumb. Pickup manufacturers are great at marketing and will sell you “nuances” in each pickup. First find out if your pickups are microphonic or squeal with high gain. If microphonic replace cuz they’re not functioning properly, if it squeals when you have a lot more gain it’s just too hot, I’d switch for a lower output. The most important factors in your tone are the amps speaker, then the amp head, how many pedals (if you got like 10 pedals on your board a pickup isn’t gonna help) and THEN pickups. If you’re playing a super clean rig like country and like the amp head then experiment with pickups and speakers.
@@snow-so3qnthank you for the reply. And i apologize for the delayed response. So im asking the question from the basic setup of a guitar and combo amp standpoint. I play hss and sss strats. So, starting at the guitar how do i know if its the PU i need to upgrade OR if its a different amp i need to look at? (Contemporary Christian genre)
So I saw a custom shop Seymour Duncan invader single coil a few weeks back. That is really cool and I had no idea they did that. It was a strat style. I wonder if they have ever made a tele set? Imagine how hot that tele would be. Turn both on and it would sound amazing.
Just the other day, I opened up my 1st pickup, because it was not working I was told and a little loop of wire was peeking out between the metal cover edge and backplate. I discovered that loop connected the primary coil (with screws on top) and the dummy or (hum-cancelling) coil with 'slugs' , AND also realized I could go back and 'Tap' that loop to Split it into a single coil later, if I want. Fun 😊.
So, in this particular pickup, if the white wire is truly grounded, the wraps of the pickup wire gradually morph into also functioning as a grounded shield.
The coil is producing X amount of noise, it isn't able to shield itself from ambient electrical phasing (fluorescent light is a common source), notice the Faraday cage built of the non magnetic cover and base plate ? As long as the reverse humbucker coil is present or you are grounded in a single coil or even add a further foil shield also grounded, you can reduce buzz to nothing. Your bridge acts as an antennae so a ground wire goes to it in addition. One of the differences between cheap and expensive guitars.
Its 2 coils, so, on a 2 wire conductor humbucker both coils are ran in parallel so you have a ground wire and a variable AC(+-) wire that transmits signal; on a 3 conductor wire humbucker its basically the same except you have a coil tap wire(this can go 2 ways to activate it as a single coil or to cut both the coils in half lowering the output). Then you have 4 conductor wires, each coil will have a ground and has its own AC transmission wire. To buck the hum you reverse wind the opposite coil.
Neither of those wires are ground, its a hot and a neutral, both carry current and the neutral is just the grounded current carrying conductor, it is NOT the same thing as a ground. Typically the neutral in a low voltage system is referred to as common though since it has no voltage
@@nocturnal101ravenous6 I didn’t mean it literally. More like, are they pretty much the same thing. A P90 is supposed to be a giant fat single coil. Isn’t a humbucker in parallel essentially just a fat single coil?
a P-90 is just a form of a single coil, a soapbar or dog ear is similar to a jazzmaster pickup or even a normal single coil, the main differences are the way they are mounted, of course differently, and you have different widths of the winds and different depths of the winds this changes the magnetic field and thus changes the tonal differences. parallel versus serial is an entirely different beast altogether.
However if you took 2 P-90s and ran them in parallel and reverse wound 1 of them, then you would have a really wide range humbucker sound, if that makes sense.
Unless it is a coil tapped humbucker that can switch to a single coil. Worth it to expand gtr voicings. Fave setting, single neck and duel bridge with separate volume controls. A single tone is fine. Coil tapped humbuckers live between les Paul and sort of fender strat or tele tones. Versatile.
@PhillipMcKnight Is that pickup you just made for sale? Let me know, id like to buy it! (I Never bought a pickup before...will you be my 1st @PhillipMcknight? 😅)
