Author Topic: Out-of-phase neck pickup (a.k.a. Peter Green mod) (Read 4927 times)

TonyGibson · « **on:** September 12, 2006, 03:11:04 PM »

Anyone have thoughts around reversing a Cold Sweat neck to make it "out of phase"? I've just recently started listening to Peter Green and I'm curious as to what that may sound like.

Yes, I know Tim has a set of Peter Green pickups available...I'm just interested in doing this on my current Les Paul (which will have an MM bridge and a CS neck).

- Tony

Philly Q · « **Reply #1 on:** September 12, 2006, 04:38:31 PM »

It's easy enough to experiment with. If you have 4 conductor wiring just reverse the wiring of one of the pickups - so Red wire to ground, Black to hot.

I think the Peter Green set will have a reverse-wound neck pickup (so the pickups will be out of phase even when using vintage-style 2 conductor wire) but I'm pretty sure the effect is the same as swapping the connections as described above. Unless the reverse wind adds some additional mojo(?)

The out-of-phase effect seems to work best if the pickups are well matched in output, but it should work with any pair of humbuckers. If you have two volume controls you can vary the amount of "out-of-phaseness" by messing about with the volume settings.

Sifu Ben · « **Reply #2 on:** September 12, 2006, 05:00:45 PM »

You can wire any 2 conductor pickups to be out of phase (after all, it was done with Peter Green's 1958 Gibson :roll: ), 4 conductor wiring allows you to wire it to a push/pull pot to switch from normal to out of phase.

Philly Q · « **Reply #3 on:** September 12, 2006, 05:43:26 PM »

Quote from: Sifu Ben

You can wire any 2 conductor pickups to be out of phase (after all, it was done with Peter Green's 1958 Gibson :roll: )

You can if you have 2 conductors (connected to the ends of the 2 coils) plus a separate ground wire (connected to the metal baseplate), but isn't BKP's "2 conductor" wiring actually a single conductor plus a braided shield?

In that case you can't just reverse the connections and use the braided shield as the "hot" wire, because it's connected not only to the end of one coil but also to the metal pickup chassis.

I believe Peter Green's pickups ended up out of phase because the neck pickup was dismantled and either the magnet was reversed or the coils were rewound in the reverse direction. It wasn't anything to do with the way the pickups were connected to the pots.

PhilKing · « **Reply #4 on:** September 12, 2006, 06:24:56 PM »

The magnet was reversed on the neck pickup when it was put back together. I'm not sure that a rewind was done to them though.