PARTIAL COIL CUT SWITCHING

Coil Cut
Using a
Resistor
or
Capacitor

Guitar Nutz 2

A friendly and very informative forum for guitar wiring and rewiring is Guitar Nuts 2. Its moderators and members are quite knowledgeable about all aspects of the electric guitar. If you have any questions about an electric guitar modification this is THE place to ask it. As a matter of fact, the Guitar Nuts were quite helpful to me when I was working on this very modification. By the way, I'm a member there myself.

Before you begin, (as we've said many times), doing any unauthorized modification on your guitar could void your warranty or decrease its resale value.

As we all know, cutting the coil of a humbucking pickup will produce a brighter sound, but doing this has its disadvantages:

• the pickup is no longer hum-cancelling
• there is a drop in the output volume
• sometimes the brighter tone desired is a little too bright

Luckily, there is an another coil cut option:
grounding the center connection through a resistor.
This method is sometimes referred to as a partial coil cut.

Also, you can replace the fixed resistor with a variable resistor.

As for the value of the reisitor, most websites suggest using 1,100 ohms for the neck pickup and 2,200 ohms for the bridge.

As another option you could try grounding the humbucker center wire through a capacitor.
The value of the capacitor should be 47 to 82 nf.
Keep in mind that using a capacitor would cause more of a tone change than using a resistor.
In fact, coil cutting through a capacitor usually has more treble than just using a resistor.

Here is a circuit which allows you to have the tones of full humbucker, coil cut through resistor or coil cut through capacitor .

To see, a great many other coil cut options, we suggest you visit our coil cut web page.

* * * * * Other Guitar Tone Circuits: * * * * *

Greasebucket Tone Circuit

Bass Cut Tone Circuit

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