Zed A. Shaw, Painter

Basically, they set the wiring so that the default wiring taps (disables) the wrong coil in a humbucker. If you tap the wrong one then you don't get it set with other coils that are inverted polarity. How do you know they're inverted/opposite polarity? You stick them on.

You can use fancy tools, but you just take the coil you want to pair, and touch it to the other one. If they stick they're magnets so they're reversed/inverted/opposite. If they repel then they're the same polarity. Ok, why does this matter? Electricity is a demon.

You see, electrical wiring and things like fluorescent light bulbs hit guitar pickups and cause a 60hz (mhz?) hum (although I think that's different with 220v and is 50?). What a humbucker does is it has two magnets of reverse polarity, so that each pickup has this hum reversed.

So you have two pickups, you put their signal together, they each have a 60 cycle hum BUT those very regular cycles are inverted with each other, and then cancel each other out. It works like noise canceling headphones do. If the magnets have same polarity this doesn't happen.

On my guitar I have two humbuckers and a single coil in the middle. I want my switching to coil tap and combine these humbuckers so that their coils work in different combos, BUT, are all hum canceling. Except, dammit the manufacturer wired the neck pickup backwards.

I know it's backwards because they specifically made the neck and bridge to be a pair, and they paired up the neck's coils to match the bridges exactly, which then make it impossible to coil tap both and combine them. What's irritating about this is all they do is make magnets.

Now I finally figure all this shit out, and reverse engineer their screw up, and figure out how to reverse the wiring to get the hum canceling I want across all the pickups, and I solder it all right, and I put my soldering iron away, and it seems to work. Great.

Then I touch the bridge ground. The bridge has a wire that connects to your body to ground the electronics and make it silent, except now it's going BZZZZZZZZZTT. WTF now I have a ground loop? This was last night and I gave up trying to find it until today.