Musician Gear & Tech Discussion

Hey

My fave axe is a modded Tele, to which I've added a neck humbucker and an anonymous stacked humbucker at the bridge. It has a 500k volume pot and Fender TBX. The switch is a five way which allows me to tap the neck pickup; I have left the bridge untapped as a humbucker.

I get a low frequency hum from the bridge pickup which isn't earth related and I can only put down to the pickup itself...frustrating as otherwise I love it.

Can anybody recommend a good branded stacked humbucker which will retain the Tele aesthetic, i.e. not a 'Hot Rails' or similar OR suggest what else may be going wrong here? Thanks

could be a lot of things... perhaps there is a break in the windings somewhere... you could test this by taking the leads from first a normal wound then a rev wound pickup and touch them to the middle lug on the vol and ground and see if it cancels the hum.

perhaps the ground wire is broke somewhere... perhaps you have the wires wired up wrong (4 conductor?)... I think parallel vs series does hum a little bit... but it's hardly noticeable.

In my humble o you are going about the pickups all wrong tho... put in a single coil texas special and have a 5 way. wire up both the neck pickup coils just like singles... and the bridge like a single. then wire the bridge to a switch and direct to the vol pot so you can turn it on in pos 4 and 5.

I have a tele with texas specials and a 4 way switch... it's baddass. I imagine wiring it up with humbuckers just makes it sound kinda like a paul... and that's no fun!

Thanks, that helps. I reckon it's just a below par pickup.

Know wot u mean about ruining all the fun of a Tele but I also have one with a standard single and neck humbucker (a 'Fat' Tele I believe). This does my twang duties and I like the higher output of this one for rocking out a bit more. The sound of the stacked humbucker is quite P90 though so it's pretty cool...

I'm not typically a high output guy anymore... but I recently built a 'clarifier' originally designed by craig anderton... I put it in my hamer steve stevens with a paf pro, a seymour antiquity, and a texas special... when that thing kicks on the output is unbelievable. Sounds like an emg except WITH tone. It also kills on clean... the difference is so unbelievable.

good luck on your search for a humbucker.

I got a ton of copper sheeting and hot glue gunned it in my pickup cavities, electronics cavity and cavity cover.

This basically eliminated all the noise. All the tutorials you will find tell you to solder each piece of copper together and then connect to the ground at some point in the grid but not all copper likes to be soldered.

That having been said, I didn't ground mine but it certainly eliminated noise.