HSS Humbucker wiring question

Hi all

First post here, so please bear with me. I picked up a new American standard HSS strat a few months ago and I will be changing out the humbucker this week. I have an SD TB-11 due to arrive today, assuming FedEx doesn't make plans otherwise. I have done a lot of searching online regarding the wiring and diagrams for this and just wanted to confirm it with you folks before having to do and redo anything.

I have usually had my father work on all my guitars & basses over the years as he has been doing this stuff for 40+ years so I trust him. I have all of the tools and I want to have my first go at it myself. I figure this one should be straight forward enough. I have soldered before so I am not a complete novice. This is more concerning "which wire goes where". The Fender colors differ from the Seymour Duncan colors which is ok, except the diagrams I have seem to differ and I just am wondering why? Here are the two main diagrams I am using:





The diagram on the left is from SD and the one on the right is from Fender (newest one I could find). I basically want to wire this up exactly the way my guitar is wired now, but just with the SD in its place. I believe the Fender is wired up from the factory with the "auto split" where the bridge humbucker is split when in the 2nd position on the 5-way switch. Please correct me if I am wrong. From the looks of it, according to the pickup color code chart, the Fender green wire (north start) gets soldered to the back of the volume pot. On the SD pickup the north start (black) goes to the 5-way switch. Is this correct? Fender also has the north and south finish wires getting soldered & taped together, whereas SD has them going to one of the 5-way switch lugs.

I appreciate any and all help and suggestions. Looking forward to hanging around here more and feeding my gear addiction.

 

Thanks. I would like it to be auto-split, so I am assuming I would just put the red and white together on the 5-way lug as in the SD diagram? I will shoot an email to SD and see if I have any luck from them on the phase part.

 

Good to know about the tone pots.

So if I were to wire it up as it is currently without the auto-split, it looks like the SD and Fender are opposite in that the Fender currently has north start goes to ground and south start to the 5-way lug, and the SD north start goes to the lug and the south start goes to ground. Does this matter?

I am still pretty new to a lot of the pickup wiring terminology and what it all means, so bear with me. Thanks for the help.

 

Excellent, thank you. Sending an email to ask about the phase issue now, hopefully will hear back.... this year..

 

D'oh... just checked out the SD site again and it looks like they do have a diagram available to wire it up "as is" without the auto split:

http://cdn.seymourduncan.com/pdfs/support/schematics/1h_2s_1v_2t_5w.pdf

 

Thanks for the advice on the phase checking. I will have to look into that. Here is the diagram I will be going with. I decided against auto-split as I would like to keep it similar or the same as the original Fender wiring, just with the new pickup. This one accomplishes that, I believe (see attached)

SD should have the wires noted correctly on this to get the phase right, but I will check anyways after it is wired up. Got the pickup last night. Have rehearsal tonight so will probably install either later tonight or tomorrow evening. Will be sure to post my results.

 

Okay so finally got down and dirty last night and opened it up. Took my time as this is my first endeavor into pickup changing myself and soldering such small components (rewired a motorcycle but it was all 16-12 gauge wiring - beefy). Everything went fine, but unfortunately I am pretty sure my new humbucker and the middle single coil are out of phase. I wasn't able to do that phase test so I was going on pure hope and unfortunately I don't think it was enough. Humbucker alone sounds great and the middle sounds fine as I did not change it, but together they drop in volume and have a pretty thin tone. Couldn't really test it until things were back together but I will probably be opening it back up tonight and swapping the black and green wires. I don't play on that switch position much (is that position 2 or 4?) so it's not a huge deal. Here are some photos I snapped last night, stuff I'm sure you've all seen before.

"Before"



Original wiring - took it for reference



Old 'Diamondback' humbucker...



New TB-11 Custom Custom all wired up. Red/white are soldered together w/ heatshrink on them, taped to the single coil wires for tidiness...



Had to drill a hole in the pickguard between the two original humbucker screws as they did not line up with the TB-11 bracket holes - not a big deal



Now I just have to take it all apart again and swap the two wires

 

Had a chance when I got home from work and I opened it back up. I found my multimeter so I was able to do the phase test and sure enough, neck and middle were both going positive and the bridge was negative.

Swapped the green and black wires and buttoned it back up (after phase testing it again - all positive). Sounds great now. No volume drop in position 2 and no more thin sound. Actually sounds really good in that position now. Really looking forward to playing it tomorrow night at our gig when I get to play it through my Rockerverb (been home testing on a little solid state Vox amp).

Thanks for all the help and advice in here.