![]() ![]() Once I got the pickups picked out, I went to work on the wiring. Um, How Are You Gonna Make This All Work? Please check out Orpheo’s great article about splitting humbuckers. This would be important because of the switching scheme used. It is a little more powerful than most PAF-type pickups, and comes with 4-conductor wire which means the pickup can be split. The bridge humbucker I chose was the ‘59/Custom Hybrid. This uses Alnico II magnets for the treble strings, for a warmer tone, and the brighter Alnico V magnets for the bass strings. I chose a true single coil, the Seymour Duncan Five-Two. ![]() It was going to be used only with the neck or bridge pickup, and never by itself. The middle position was something I really had to consider. This pickup is dead silent by itself, and makes an ideal neck pickup if you like the tone but not the hum. This pickup can be split, so when it is used in conjunction with another rw/rp single coil, it will cancel the hum, and give a better quacky, notchy sound. I started with this idea, choosing the Classic Stack Plus Strat for the neck position. Seymour Duncan makes noiseless Strat pickups using either a stacked or side-by-side design. I love it in conjunction with the neck or bridge pickup though, so it was important for me to have. I also know that I never use the middle pickup alone, even on my Strat. I wanted to solve the the hum and balance problems between the pickups. When building a guitar using Warmoth Guitar Parts this past year, I set out to build the ultimate HSS guitar. It is selecting the neck pickup, a Classic Strat Stack Plus. The Solution We Have Been Waiting For This is the installed switch. Oh, I also didn’t like the bright pink, yellow and green colors in the 80s too, but that is another article. And what I didn’t like about many of the HSS guitars back then was the huge volume jump when you put that humbucker on. They used hot humbuckers to send that guitar signal through a rack of effects. This was certainly a problem for many 80s era HSS guitars. So when the humbucker is selected, sometimes there is a huge jump in volume. The volume difference between single coil pickups and a humbucker can be huge. While I can tolerate this in a Strat with three singles because the noise is always there, it’s hard for me to deal with it coming and going, especially with distortion.Īlso, we have balance problems. That is three out of the five positions that have that annoying 60-cycle hum. Even if you get a reverse wound/reverse polarity single coil pickup for the middle position, there will be hum when the neck single coil is used alone, as well as when you use the middle single coil alone, and the middle single coil with the humbucker. Single coil pickups hum, and humbuckers don’t. What Could Possibly Go Wrong? The unsuspecting guitar. If we combine these great sounds, we should have a Guitar That Rules the World. The most-used sound of a twin humbucker guitar is that bridge pickup with the tightness and definition, especially in heavy music. On the surface, why would anyone need another pickup configuration? For many players the wonderful sound of the Strat is defined by the sound of the neck and middle single coils, and that quacky sound of them both played together, in parallel. The Best of Both Worlds, Right? Is an HSS setup the mullet of the pickup world? This article is my take on this pickup configuration, and how I came up with a way it could work for me. And much liked the maligned mullet, we get, in theory, business in the front and party in the rear. The HSS (which stands for humbucker-single-single) pickup configuration gained popularity in the 80s, much like everyone’s favorite haircut, the mullet. ![]() The idea is to get that chimey, jangly, quack from the neck and the middle single coils and the rock and roll from the humbucker in the bridge position. Guitars with one humbucker and two single coils always seem to be a compromise. ![]()
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