Doing The Splits - Part 2

In last issues Mod squad we looked at the basics of coil splitting here Dave Burrluck investigates some different concepts.

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You’ll already know that if you want to get the most from your humbucking pickup, then you’ll need four conductor wiring. Don’t worry, you won’t lose your ‘vintage’ tone, but it’ll give you maximum flexibility, especially if you want to get some single-coil sounds.

One seemingly new concept is the ‘partial’ coil split. This was explained to me by luthier Brinsley Schwarz who, at the time, worked at Chandler Guitars in Richmond. As we said last issue, a coil-split is achieved by knocking out one coil. But that, on a lower-powered humbucker, can lead to a thin sound. The partial coil-split, however, puts a resistor between the split point and ground so some of the dumped coil is retained producing a slightly thicker, bigger sounding split. PRS is one mainstream company that, since the launch of the David Grissom DGT, installs a different value resistor for the neck and bridge pickup to achieve these ‘bigger’ sounding coil-splits. You can even use a variable resistor, like a volume control or (more usually) a smaller trim-pot, so you can tune in exactly how much of that dumped coil you want to hear.