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J/MM phase issues, I'm stumped, please help!

B

BarkerBass

Sep 14, 2007
679
22
37
York/Newcastle, England
#1
Hi all please help me out here.

I have a phase problem for you.

I have built a bass with a humbucking (in line) jazz pickup in the neck and a wilkinson duelcoil musicman pickup in the bridge position.

Now I have tried every wiring combination for the MM and cannot find one which is in phase with the neck pickup on all strings.

I have tried every combo, some sound great on own but either the E and A or the D and G strings sound thin when blended with the neck pickup.

What can I do to solve this?

previously I had a similar problem on a P/J and had to reverse the wires between the P pickup, is there a similar fix on this pickup combo which I can try?

So far I've left the neck pickup (which only has 2 wires coming form it) alone as I figured reversing it's wiring would only swap which half of the strings were out of phase, am I right?

If you have ANY ideas please let me know.

Cheers, BarkerBass
 
#5
Analyze one pickup at a time.

Wire only the J pickup to the output, see if it sounds good, not thin and overly trebly. Then wire only the MM pickup to the output, try each combination until you get a solid humbucking sound. Remember which wires went to the output in each case.

After that, wire the J and MM into series or parallel, however you want - if you get a very thin and trebly sound, swap the two output leads of one of the pickups and there you go.

Google for the most common humbucker wiring colors, I saw a chart someplace, but no clue where.
 
#6
I've tried every combo on the MM, my thoughts being that swapping the wires on the Jazz humbucker will only reverse which side of the pickup is out of phase.

So far I've failed to find a non out of phase combo but have wired them anyway so that the pickups solod sound good. I will no doubt be swapping the pickups at a much later date

still, help is appreciated if anyone has a brain wave
 
#8
More of a question than an answer, but if you were able to isolate each coil in the neck pickup, using a multi position switch, might you be able to have the neck pickup coils running in the same direction when blended and then back to hum canceling when soloed?

Hopefully there's something simpler.

Good luck!
 
#9
I believe the problem is in the neck pickup phasing.
The bridge hum-bucker's coils go across all strings, no matter what. If you're having problems with string pairs only, then it's in the in-line hum bucker.

How are you going to wire the wilkinson pickup, series or parallel? Usually, series ties the Red and White together and taped off, Black being hot and Green is ground (some pickups have green as hot, black as ground...). Parallel would be black/red (hot), white/green (ground).

With the humbucker's wiring settled, change around the neck pickup's wiring and see if you can get to a happy place.
 

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