Half of Jazz Pick Up Not Working - (G & D String)

You'd be better off posting this in "Pick-ups & Electronics. In the meantime, please don't disassemble the pickup.

Riis

 

This is strange. Unlike a P bass pickup, a J bass pickup has the same magnet and and coil for all four strings. Unless something happened to the pole pieces, there isn't a way I know of for it to work on only two strings.

 

I'm thinking we may be dealing with a side-by-side humbucker jammed in a J shell...just a possibility.

Riis

 

Tape has no place inside a bass.

 

What Jazz pickups have 4 wires?

When two wires are soldered together In a 4-wire (2-coil) set, sounds like two coils wired in Series. If the connection between two soldered wires breaks, the whole pickup would be dead. What I believe happened is that the two soldered wires started to touch ground (bad tape) and cancelled out one coil - as if you did a split-coil in a standard hum bucker like a Music Man pickup.

 

any number of stacks and especially split-coils like we're obviously dealing with here

 

Thank you for your amazing insight.

 

You’re welcome

 

I think the only flaw in your logic is your uncertainty. You're absolutely right - from what's described, it has to be a split coil, wired in parallel, with one coil open, or wired in series, with one coil shorted.

To make half a pickup fail by demagnetization would be very difficult to do - you could design a special demagnetizer that might pull it off, but in the real world, the "accidental" way that you might demagnetize alnico would be with heat. The issue with that theory is that your bass would be on fire long before the pole pieces would demagnetize. I'm strongly in favor of the wiring explanation.