I got this 8 month old squier California series strat. Its got a Single coil stock pup at the bridge. Is it worth while to change it to a SD SJB humbucker? I mean will there be a major tone mod? And do I just remove the bridge pup and cut the pick guard up to install the 'bucker?
you should probably first check if the wood is routed for a humbucker, most likely it should be in which case you'll need to cut the pickguard and yes the tone will change quite drastically. keep in mind that you will experience quite a volume jump when switching between single coils and hummers. IMO HSS makes for very versatile guitars. I have a washburn with BL's and I love that gat
Wood is routed: Does that mean that the pickup cavity cut is large enough for the future accommodation of a humbucker?
That's correct. They normally cut the wood using a template so technically you could install 3 buckers if you wanted. It's just so that different models can be made out of the same batches of wood (HSS, SSS, HSH, etc.). I have another HSS guitar and HSH pickups that I want to install in it so I too need to rout the pickguard for that one. Just waiting for it to come back from repairs. In fact I have a lot of mods for it. That is going to be one very ugly guitar, but sweeeet sounding
A 4 conductor cable is basically any cable that has 4 different cables inside it. think of those black cables which in turn have red, green, white, blue, etc.. Applied to a humbucker, this means that you will have a seperate inner cable (one of the red, blue, etc) for each end of the coil winding, and a seperate sheild for ground. This way, you can wire both coils of the humbucker, in series, or parallel or out of phase with each other, or even just use a single coil instead of using both. Some cheap humbuckers have only two wires coming out of them instead of 4, so that limits ur options drastically, unless u wanna dig into the humbucker to get the other 2 out.
A lot of SD buckers and most vintage style bucker models have only 2 conductor wiring. Its definitely not a cost thing.
Yup, they have braided cables too for authentic vintage feel.All Dimarzios come in 4 conductor wiring default. With SD you have specify that you want 4 conductor for a lot of their models.
4 conductor simply means four leads coming off the pickup like already mentioned and this only applies to humbuckers but any humbucker with 2 leads can be cut down the middle and lead-dressed to become a 4 conductor pickup. It is not a question of whether a pickup is cheap or expensive but merely a convenience offered by manufacturers these days. Quite a few guitar manufacturers (most notably Ibanez) offer many combinations like TruDuo, Split-five series/parallel etc, blah-blah, the list goes on so it makes sense for pickup makers to provide 4 conductors for you to work with rather than doing it yourself and possibly messing things up. So the wires are 1 Hot 2 Coil 1 End 3 Coil 2 Start 4 Ground So if you want a regular humbucker you simply join 2 and 3 and wire 1 and 4 same as your single coil (And NO you CANNOT cut out 2 and 3), other than that you may need to drill holes in your pickguard to install switches and/or get some push/pull pots to use the combos. I personally like regular humbuckers simply because I've got killer noiseless singles so splitting makes absolutely no sense to me, but your taste might be different, Feel free to experiment. Ironically, my pups have 5 conductors What a waste of Pickguard Space PS: I see some guys playing HOLI with the colors of these wires. Remember that the leads ARE COLOR CODED. You need to check your particular pickup's data sheet to know what goes where.
