Has anyone tried wiring single coils in series?

[dreamist]

I'm thinking about wiring 2 single coils in series as one of the pickup combinations in my HSS guitar. Has anyone tried that before? Does it sound close to a humbucker pup? My 2 pickups are SSL-1 and APS-2.

[Zhangliqun]

It actually IS a humbucker pickup at that point. The problem is that even with vintage single coils, particularly with neck/middle, you end up with a pickup that's too hot (12-13k with #42 gauge wire) and muddy for the non-bridge positions.

Now if you use one humbucker coil in series with your middle pu, you might get a fairly usable "quack" tone, especially if it's the screw coil (facing bridge) of the humbucker, and especially if the humbucker is more or less vintage output.

[frankfalbo]

I've got two guitars with that option. One has 3 G&L ASAT soapbar singles which are very bright and cutting. The other has very low output singles. The middle is just over 5k, and the bridge is a 6k tap/8k+ full. The G&L in series is very "classic Kings X" sounding. It's still got snap and bite. With the two lower output singles, I use the tapped bridge output for the series wiring, and it's definitely not dark. The singles are all 42AWG.

In my experience it's mostly valid as a bridge/middle combination. If you've got an H/S/S then combining neck and middle in series will be okay, but Zhang's right, that's a little hot when positioned up toward the neck.

For me, the fun sound to experiment with would be the bridge pickup, bridge side coil+middle pickup in series. But I don't know if you have the polarity orientation to make that hum-cancelling.

[jeremy]

i threw together a strat a while back that had three single coils, normal neck and bridge with the middle pup jammed up next to the bridge pup. i used a normal 3 way for selecting the neck/both/bridge pups and a mini on/on/on switch to select series/split/parallel for the two bridge single coils. i liked the tone of that much more than when i used series wiring on two traditionally placed tele pups. the tele gave a much fatter higher output tone than the typical parallel option but it still had a similar tonality.

with the two strat pups next to each other it sounded more bucker-ish but still had some chime to it compared to typical humbucker

[ArtieToo]

I've got my Strat wired so that the #2 and #4 positions are neck & middle in seires, and middle & bridge in series respectively. But in my case, I'm using all three tapped pups. So in the series mode, the pup outputs cut in half. That system works beautifully, but it does require tapped pups.

I would think it would work with others as long as you match the outputs up just right.