Peter Green mod without flipping the magnet

Peter Green with the famous Greenie

Oh, yes, the Peter Green mod. A very nice one.

You know the story. The guy from the guitar workshop screwed up Peter Green's Les Paul and mounted the neck humbucker with a flipped magnet. The result: out of phase or reversed polarity of the neck pickup and a weird nasal sound in the middle position. The guy realized something's wrong and tried different workarounds to solve the problem. The best thing he could came up with was to rotate the pickup with the screw poles towards the bridge. Of course that didn't change anything, because you can't reverse the polarity by moving the pickup around. If he knew, he could just flip the magnet the other way and fix the damn pickup.

The best part is that everybody absolutely loved that sound and it earned its place in the history of blues guitar. That's the reason you are here. You want that sound. You want to "mess up" your guitar too.

The problem is it's a little bit exhausting and difficult to dismount, crack open and flip the magnet of a humbucker.

Good news! You can invert the phase without flipping the magnet and it works with single coil pickups too. How? Well, you mess around with the other end of the pickup. You just invert the neck pickup wires inside the control cavity of your guitar. Instead of ground to the case and hot to the pin of the volume pot, you solder the wires the other way around. And, voila, your pickup is now electrically out of phase (not magnetically like the original).

The only impediment here is that, compared to the flipped magnet state, the pickup with inverted wiring is now out of phase with the whole universe, not just the other pickup. Replacing the ground with the hot wire is like sitting on your head. It's against nature. So, the pickup basically objects to this by humming and buzzing like a single coil. It doesn't matter if it's a humbucker. You'll need the same tricks and tools as for a single coil to make it quiet (AC grounding, noise gates, etc).

Brighten up any humbucker (the screw coil tweak)

You probably heard of and did lots of mods on your guitar, hoping to brighten up your humbuckers and make them sound more like single coils.

This is not possible without splitting and leaving just one coil of the humbucker active. It's easy to do that even with the old 2 conductor humbuckers, by soldering the link wire to the ground, but you will go mad afterwards because you will lose half of the output. This is a real problem if you have average output humbuckers of 7-8 kΩ, because the split coil has about 4 kΩ output, less than a vintage single coil pickup of at least 5-6 kΩ.

What can be done? Well, it would be nice if we could keep both coils of the humbucker active and enhance the sound, without losing output. They say, if you lower the pickup and increase the distance between the pole pieces and the strings, you'll get a cleaner sound. But, again, this affects the output volume, even if you still have full pickup impedance.

Good news! There is another way and it doesn't harm the output of the humbucker, nor the guitar. It's all about the pole pieces position, more precisely the screws.

Screw pole pieces adjustment

Instead of lowering the whole pickup and raise the screws out of the holes, making them look like Total Recall eye popping, you do the opposite. You lower the screws completely inside the holes and leave the pickup up high close to the strings for optimal output, like this:

Seymour Duncan Jazz pickup

with lowered screw pole pieces

What happens? It's obvious. The screw coil loses tie to the strings, but not completely. Not like a dead split coil. It just receives less strings vibration. This coil has now a dull output sound and decreased volume. The other one, the slug coil, has the usual single coilish sound which is now the main coil of the humbucker. The resulting sound of the tweaked humbucker will be the combination of the two and it's a very bright and clean sound with full pickup impedance. The bridge humbucker has even a slightly quacky sound now.

Compared to other pickups, one might say it will sound like a P90, because of the large winding and just one row of active pole pieces.

P90 soap bar pickup

This simple tweak makes a huge difference in sound but leaves the guitar as it is. You don't void the warranty and you don't damage the guitar by applying crazy irreversible mods.

Yes, of course, you can go so far as to remove the screws all together and leave that coil without poles.

Humbucker with removed screw pole pieces

The sound will be even brighter and the pickup will get closer to a P90. But, man, it looks just like a piece of garbage with 6 holes in it. I really don't like that picture. Do you?