Generally, if you have a pickup, and have no idea which wire is which and you can’t find a corresponding schematic, the advice is usually just to hook it up and see what happens, then make any corrections. The methods in the video take all the guesswork out of the process.
You’ll learn how to find out, just about everything you need to know to properly wire a humbucker. How to figure out which wires go to which coils, and therefore how to hook them up for series or parallel, and even a cool way to tell the polarity of each coil. This video was pointed out to me by Dave Fliski of Heavy Air Pickups.
This had some great tips. Thanks! I’m still confused why you might want to wire two pick ups out of phase with each other. And I guess you can take a 4 wire humbucker and wire it in series or in parallel with itself. It seems to sound OK either way. When would you do one vs the other?
I’m replacing a single coil with a humbucker in a Squier. There sure are a lot of options.
Wiring pickups out of phase will give you a nasally, cocked wah kind of sound. With some overdrive it can really cut through a mix and sound kind of cool.
Wiring a humbucker in parallel with itself is essentially like having two single coils right next to each other, and will have a brighter sound then a series wired humbucker.