Ersatz humbuckers?

[rjgoos]

If a person was making an instrument with individual-string single-coil pickups, could the pickups be wired together to produce hum cancellation?


Jay

[BrendaEM]

As far as I know, yes. I believe the windings and pole-pieces are reversed.

There was a great guitar site called guitarnuts.com, but commerce seems to have ravaged their site, making all links redirects.

Stewmac has some info on it.
http://www.stewmac.com/cgi-bin/hazel.cgi/hzpi/u/HzSt0116160m170m0n100m0U0n0n12130m1510151113/hazel.cgi?action=SERVE&sku=i-4000&PG=2&s1=Free_info_sheets&item=freeinfo/fi.html

I think the distance between the pickups will affect the sound. There is a pickup location simulation here:
http://www.till.com/articles/PickupResponseDemo/

[BigDaddyPoo]

If you want to be able to have a seperate output for each string, you are going to have to do either individual humbuckers per string, or more than one single coil per string which can then be wired in reverse polarity. If you wire the pickups for seperate strings together in any way, the output will not be a single string any more.

I guess another option would be to use dummy coils or stacked pickups. Otherwise, you'd have to go with piezo system like a graphtech ghost.

If your plan is to be able to have, say a stereo output that you can sometimes have split 5 strings to one output and 5 to the other, sometimes and maybe a 4/6 split other times, you could probably come up with a fancy switching system that had the groups out of phase with each other. You may need to stagger the poles so you don't have phase cancellation of adjacent strings.