So I finally got round to fitting a miniswitch in my custom guitar with calibrated VHII's for coil tapping earlier today. Took a while to sort out the wires and test it as it's getting a bit crowded now with a miniswitch AND a midboost kit.
First impressions - wow! The switch when activated only turns on the outer coils (screw coils) of the humbuckers the way I've wired it, as I was going for more strat like sounds - and in that aspect it really delivered. I tested the single coil mode against the 2004 USA Fender Strat I've got with stock pickups, and I think I like the tapped sound on my custom guitar more! On clean with a bit of chorus on the amp, the sound was beautiful - complex and shimmering.
The pickups sounded very close to strat pickups partly because of the coils that I chose to tap, but also because of the layout of them. The custom has a neck pickup placed with the screw coil where the strat neck pickup would be (nothing new there), but also the bridge pickup is at the same angle as a strat's bridge pickup. With the 500k pots I used the bridge single coil mode sounds just a little ice pickey, but turning down the volume very slightly (8 at the lowest) doesn't really roll much volume off but takes a bit of high end from the sound, which just nicely kills that slight 'ice pickey' sound.
I'd really recommend doing a switch like this with a pair of VHII's (mine was a miniswitch but you could probably use a DPDT on/on push-pull control pot instead, so the guitar looks the same cosmetically). These VHII's are just an incredible pair of pickups - they're perfect distorted rock pickups for me, but I've never been a fan of any humbucker's clean sound so before now I wouldn't have used them for that. Now I've discovered how tapping them gives such a great clean sound, the guitar has become so much more versatile.
I've been putting off filling in a HC review and Shredaholic.com review until I could review the pickups tapped as I didn't feel the review would be comprehensive enough, but now all I need is to get a pic of them in my guitar and I'll get the full review up.
