I like to support my customers as much as I can so here is my drawing of Gibson 50s wiring. Hopefully it will help you fit your new pickups.
The 50s wiring is great for players wanting to retain some treble when the guitar volume is turned down.
The difference between the 50’s and modern wiring is in how the tone capacitor is connected to the volume pot. It’s a very simple modification if you have modern wiring and are curious.
I’ve used my humbucker colour code (same as Seymour Duncan).
There really is nothing wrong with modern wiring, having your tone darken as you turn down the volume can be very useful in some settings. So try both and see which suits you best.
It seems that all the cool kids and ‘experts’ on the internet are telling us it has to be 50s wiring or nothing but for anyone with a soldering iron it’s an easy mod and completely reversible so experiment for yourself. You may find you like 50’s for the neck pickup and modern for the bridge.
I like to support my customers any way I can so here’s a Telecaster Wiring Diagram for a standard Telecaster to help you fit your set of Mr Glyns Pickups.
Telecaster Wiring Diagram
Tele Wiring Diagram
I’ve drawn this diagram using the colour code for Mr Glyn’s Pickups.
I use shielded cable for my Telecaster pickups so not only do they hum less but by swapping the red and white wires it’s easy to reverse their phase. That’s really useful if you want to use a 4 way switch to combine the two pickups in series as a humbucker.
This is the standard Telecaster Wiring Diagram – there are plenty of modifications you could make to change things a little.
Changing the capacitor to one of a lower value will lessen the effect of using the tone control. A .022 microfarad cap, for instance, will make the tone control more subtle to use but it’s not great if you like using the tone as a wah wah.
You may have heard of Series Parallel wiring in guitars, here’s how to do it.
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There are numerous ways to wire a humbucker. The standard way is in series, its the sound we all know, with that pushy lower mid tone.
Some players like to coil tap their humbucker to get the option of a thinner more Fender type tone. That is essentially switching one coil off.
A less well used way to thin the sound is with a series/parallel switch. A humbucker wired in parallel with itself is more single coil like than in standard wiring, there’s less volume drop than coil tapping and it still hum cancels. I much prefer it.
So what is Series/Parallel all about?
The standard way of wiring a humbucker is in series. PAF’s are wired this way and it gives the traditional full sound with plenty of mids and bottom end. Its simply one coil following the other, the end of one coil connected to the beginning of the next.
Wiring a humbucker in parallel is quite a different sound. It’s much more similar to a single coil sound but the pickups is still hum cancelling. There is a drop in volume though not as much as with a coil tap (switching one coil off). And the pickup is still hum cancelling. It’s like taking away the lower mid range push that a series wired humbucker has and being left with more clarity.
This humbucker series parallel diagram shows how to do it with a push/pull switch. With the series parallel switch down and the humbucker is wired in series (normal), pull it up and it’s in parallel. The wiring colour code is for Mr Glyn’s Pickups (I use the same colours as Seymour Duncan).
Series Parallel diagram
Not such a hard diagram to follow is it? I’m not sure why this modification isn’t more popular. Maybe it’s a little harder to understand than coil tapping, maybe it’s because its a little more complicated to wire up. I certainly prefer it in my guitars to give an extra tonal option without taking anything away from the original sound.
Another example of 2 pickup coils wired in parallel is a Strat on position 2 and 4 of the switch. That sound is often incorrectly referred to as ‘out of phase’ but it actually is the sound of 2 coils wired in parallel with each other. So think of the chimey clarity a humbucker would have wired that way and that will give you an idea what a series parallel switch might do for you.
As with all guitar mods its worth having a play around and see if it suits you. It certainly works for me.
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I’m going to be posting a few more wiring diagrams in the near future. Keep an eye on this blog or my social media:
Mr Glyns Pickups is a small business which means I can communicate with my customers one to one. I’m always happy to discuss your requirements, answer questions and give advice. I want to know about the guitars my pickups are going in, send me pictures, send me recordings.
