coil tapping

[jay43]

I tried searching but found very little on the subject. can someone explain to me what it is and hows its used, and are there any advantages to having that option.

[BurningSkies]

Originally Posted by jay43

I tried searching but found very little on the subject. can someone explain to me what it is and hows its used, and are there any advantages to having that option.

If you have a two coil pickup (humbucker) then a coil tap lets you use the signal from one half of the pair, allowing for a 'single coil' sound if you'd like.

It tends to be more useful on a guitar (like having a strat with a humbucker in the bridge that you can still get a close to strat single coil lead sound out of too).

[line6man]

Coil tapping is when you have a pickup wound with a tap partway through the winding, so that you can select an underwound portion instead of the full coil.

Coil tapping is commonly confused with coil splitting, and I seem to be the only one here that gets OCD about it.

Coil splitting is technically the switching of a series-or-parallel wired humbucker to single coil mode, where only one coil is used, though the term also commonly applies to series/parallel switching.

[Stealth]

Originally Posted by BurningSkies

If you have a two coil pickup (humbucker) then a coil tap lets you use the signal from one half of the pair, allowing for a 'single coil' sound if you'd like.

It tends to be more useful on a guitar (like having a strat with a humbucker in the bridge that you can still get a close to strat single coil lead sound out of too).

Unfortunately, that's a misnomer. Much like the vibrato bar on electric guitars, which should be called a tremolo bar.

• a coil tap is a pickup coil that commonly has three leads, one being hot, one being ground and one being in somewhere in the middle of the coil, allowing you to select whether you want the full number of turns in the pickup coil to produce sound or only the top/bottom part of the coil. That way you can lower the pickup's impedance changing its sound.
• a coil split is separating the coils in the humbucker and using only one coil in the set to get a single-coil sound out of it.

The difference is, a humbucker can be coil-split, a single-coil can be coil-tapped. On basses, most of the single-coils don't have an extra lead for coil tapping and so far I don't think I've seen much use in it. On the other hand, coil-splitting a humbucker is common, even done on some big-name brands like MusicMan basses where you can "kill" one of the coils in that MM humbucker to get a single-coil-ey sound out of it.

Edit: naturally, Line6man beat me to the punch. :P

[line6man]

Originally Posted by Stealth

The difference is, a humbucker can be coil-split, a single-coil can be coil-tapped.

A humbucker can be tapped too. Well, sort of.

My Curtis Novak pickup is two Jazz bass pickups.
One of them is a regular Jazz pickup that's tapped, and the other is only wound with half as much wire as a normal Jazz pickup.

In single coil mode, I use the full winding of the full sized coil by itself, and in humbucker mode, I run the half-wound coil into the tapped portion of the full sized coil.
Sort of a coil split and tap at the same time.

I think I'm the only one with such a pickup though.

[i_got_a_mohawk]

Well, just what everyone else said really.

Have quite a nice coil-tappable pup in a tele clone. Can switch between a standard tele bridge pup and an overwound tele-come-P90 sound.

[jay43]

Thanks another quick question how much does that change the sound? enough to be noticeable ?

[hdracer]

Yes, very much on my DiMarzio Model One, I have a 3 way switch wired Series-Coil Split-Parallel. It adds flexibility.

[MglMatador]

Thanks another quick question how much does that change the sound? enough to be noticeable ?

The frequency of the resonant bump is largely determined by the coil inductance, which is largely determined by the type and number of turns of wire. Using the tap lowers the inductance and will raise the resonant frequency (all other things being equal). This will make the pickup sound 'brighter' with a more pronounced attack.

Coincidentally this is why over-wound pickups tend to sound darker, as inductance increases which lowers the resonant bump (again, all other things being equal).

[Stealth]

Originally Posted by line6man

My Curtis Novak pickup is two Jazz bass pickups.
One of them is a regular Jazz pickup that's tapped, and the other is only wound with half as much wire as a normal Jazz pickup.

In single coil mode, I use the full winding of the full sized coil by itself, and in humbucker mode, I run the half-wound coil into the tapped portion of the full sized coil.
Sort of a coil split and tap at the same time.

Wow, that's quite a novel approach. Nice to know there's hybrids like that too.

[Arvin]

Originally Posted by Stealth

Unfortunately, that's a misnomer. Much like the vibrato bar on electric guitars, which should be called a tremolo bar.

And actually, that's a misnomer, too. Vibrato is a pitch modulation, whereas tremolo is an amplitude modulation. Since a whammy bar varies pitch, it should properly be called a "vibrato bar." "Tremolo bar" is incorrect.