SwordgeekThought experiment: How does the bridge pickup of a SSH strat compare to the bridge/mid setting on a SSS strat?
jontree255In my experience I’d say they’re very different. I have an SSH and SSS strat and bridge+middle with single coils is not going to get you in the realm of a humbucker other than the noise cancelling aspect.
Agreed. Unless you have coil-splitting otherwise its standard humbucker differences; beefier, louder, moar rawk.
metaStaticI heard someone call it a quack and I literally can't hear anything else now.
the noise cancelling positions don't exist for me anymore.
Can confirm what the other poster said, very different. In addition, a humbucker with a coil split doesn’t really sound like a single coil generally (there are some things you can do to get closer, but we’re only talking about raw pickups with no mods here).
It all has to do with the windings and the fact that the magnets aren’t interacting the same way. A fender Texas Special bridge single coil is about 6.56k ohms impedance. The Shawbucker 2 is about 7.8k ohms. So humbuckers today aren’t really just two single coils flipped and stacked. I don’t know enough of my history to say whether that’s how they started, but if someone were to claim that I would totally believe it.
very different, because they aren’t (typically) wired in the same way.
what gives (typical) humbuckers their sound is two coils being wired in series. on the other hand positions 2 and 4 in strats get their sound from being wired in parallel.
if you have a chance try a HSS guitar with coil splitting in position 2. i think most have it these days. that will give you
position 1: full humbucker (series) position 2: split-humbucker bridge + middle pickup in series
A/B those switch positions and you will understand the difference very quickly.
you can of course change the series/parallel wiring in pickups and guitars to cater to your tonal preferences, but it’s not common.
The separation between the two single coils leads to phase cancellation too which is what gives the quack sound.
Also, it’s easy to wire and/or switch a 4-wire humbucker in parallel, so that would be the interesting thing to compare. Or wire the singles in series. Though that will interfere with your normal switching.
I have a Godin with HSH - it still quacks, but not like a real strat. Coil tapping can get you there, with the right pickups.
The best Strat I ever had was wired with a Dimarzio HS-3 in the bridge, which is a stacked humbucker famously used by Yngwie, and two stock Strat pups - using a Superswitch I was able to make it extremely quiet, while always having two single coils in the notch positions. I was even able to add the HS3’s silent coil to the neck pickup, which wasn’t quite like a normal neck, but pretty close with no buzz.