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Lots of Pickup Wiring Questions

DerHoggz

I like cats :|
Inactive
Feb 13, 2009
1,704
1,037
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Western Pennsylvania
First off, RWRP, does anyone have a handy sketch or something to explain this? So if you have a j pickup with two coils, one for the E and A and one for the D an G, how do the coils differ? Is one wound clockwise, and the other wound counterclockwise with the positive and negative connections switched?

Using a regular p pickup, which is RWRP if I remember correctly, can you switch between parallel and series. Same question for dual coil jazzez, also RWRP.
 
RWRP means reverse-wound-reverse-polarity, which is pretty much self-explanatory...

Coils are RWRP so that when combined, hum/noise comes in equally on both coils, but on opposite phases, so it cancels itself out.

RWRP has nothing to do with your series/parallel options, it relates strictly to a pickups ability to humcancel.

If you want to do your RWRP pickups series instead of parallel or vice versa, they will still humcancel.
 
This is what I rhink RWRP means is it right?

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The coil on the left is wound counterclockwise, with the one on the right being clockwise. The left coil starts with the negative, and the one on the right it starts with the positive.

In regards to series/parallel, that meant within the pickup itself, between the two coils.
 
Almost completely true.

The two left-hand polepieces also need to be North-up oriented, the two right-hand polepieces need to be South-up oriented, or the other way around (left is South-up, right is North-up). Only then you get the "RP" part of the "RWRP" (reverse wound, reverse polarity).

Serial and parallel are as you described.
 
What you are doing with RWRP is putting the coils out of phase with each other. This inverts the signal and cancels the hum associated with electro magnetic interference. This works regardless of the core. So now that you have the Hum taken care of you want to have the signal In-Phase, and that is why each coil has oposite polarity.

So here is what you want to do.. Your first coil will have a start wire and end wire, as will you second coil. Connect the end wire of coil one to the end wire of coil two. One of the starts becomes the hot lead, and the other becomes ground.

For magnets, Coil one you put north at the strings, and coil two you put south at the strings.

Matthew.
 
what im talking about is a series humbucker.. If you have a 5k north coil, and a 5k south coil you get a 10k pickup. In Parallel the 5k and 5k half to 2.5k.

You can do rwrp in parallel as well.

Series / Parallel has nothing to do with RWRP. Series Parallel refers to how the two coils are connected. In series the two coils are connected end to end to create one really long wire, with twice the resistance. In Parallel the two starts are connected and the two ends are connected creating HALF the resistance... In the case of parallel RWRP it would be start-coil-1/end-coil-2 together and end-coil-1/start-coil-2 together. It can be done with switches im just not familiar with the wiring of that.

Series:

Code:
----coil1----coil2----

parallel:

Code:
|
|
--------------
|            |
Coil 1    Coil 2
|            |
--------------
|
|

Makes sense?