I think the issue is with pickup design. What is happening is the outside of the wrap on the neck pickup is the ground wire. The inside wire should be the ground. What happens is this causes an increase in capacitance and noisy poles. If you flip the polarity at the pot (red to ground and black to the pot), the pole pieces won’t be noisy anymore. However, this puts the bridge pickup into phase with the neck pickup and it sounds terrible as a lot of frequencies get cancelled. You also have to reverse the polarity on the bridge pickup. However, once you do that, your bridge will have noisy poles. Normally, grounding the poles like I did fixes it. However, it still left me with the bass most side pole noisy, which is the one my thumb hits. I’m not sure how it didn’t ground it. I cleaned it and redid the grounding and it’s still noisy. I’ll update with my findings on the Lindy Fralin pickups. They’re supposed to be almost even in output across the frequency spectrum. No scoop and very vintage sounding.
