How to replace a pickup that has 3 wires coming off from it?

[Joyscoop]

Greetings to all,

I've got an Ibanez SR650E and I love the instrument in general. The sound is fine but I want to experiment a little with pickups. The thing is that all aftermarket pickups have 2 wires coming off from them but the stock Nordstrand-designed ones currently on the bass have 3 wires coming off from them. I suspect this is to facilitate the two different circuits for Active/Passive operation (you can choose with a switch).

I contacted Nordstrand and they told me that Carey Nordstrand only designed the pickup itself, and they don't know what kind of implementation Ibanez eventually did with the pickup.

My question, for anyone with relevant experience/knowledge is: Will the aftermarket pickup work if I split its single black cable according to the picture I am attaching?

Thanks in advance for any replies
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[ctmullins]

Nope. You can’t just guess what the wires are. Use a multimeter to figure out what they are.

Often, the three wires are coil + (also called “signal” or “hot”), coil - (also called “ground” or “earth”), and shield. Shield should always be connected to ground, and the coil ground usually is too. But having the coil ground separate from the shield ground allows you to wire things like series/parallel or phase switches without disturbing the shielding.

Based on your drawing, I suspect this is exactly what you have in your Ibanez.

Many aftermarket pickups have more than two wires. The ones that only have two wires either have the shield permanently attached to the coil -, or they don’t have any shielding. You can still use a pickup like this by connecting its ground wire to ground, and its hot wire to the preamp, or the volume control, or wherever your existing pickup has its signal connected.

Oh, and welcome to the TalkBass community!

 

[Joyscoop]

thank a lot ctmullins. According to your reassurance, I went ahead and ordered a pickup, strangely enough from Nordstrand themselves since they can make a different pickup that fits perfectly into my existing covers (that no other pickup has).

 

[ctmullins]

Most "real" Nordstrand pickups that I've seen have three wires already.

 

[Joyscoop]

The guy over at Nordstrand explained that this depends on the model, for example I remember him saying that a Big Split pickup would have three wires coming off from it. The one I am after, an NP4A, only has two.

Whatever the case, I will make sense of what to do, I am not exactly a newbie with electrical circuits, I know my way around a multimeter and a soldering iron so I'm pretty sure I'll find a way to make it work. (of course I know what they say about assumptions and whose mothers they are heh).

The very strange thing is that in my current setup one of the wires from both neck and bridge pickups goes directly onto the bass EQ pot and the other two go onto different soldering points of the pickup balance pot backplate. None of them goes to the volume pot.