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.
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?
