Dimarzio shockwave system with single coil ala Eric Johnson switching .

kriszuki

I am building a partscaster and have recently bought the Dimarzio shockwave pickups and preamp system from a fellow forum member. I have the wiring diagram to set it up. 

Is it possible to have a switch (or switches) that changes between the standard shockwave system to just a single coil of the stacked pickup.  Apparently Eric Johnson uses a similar pickup but only wires one of the stacked pickups to get his bridge pickup sound.

I also read that when the preamp is connected to the pickup it adds a load to it and therefore changes the tone. So is it possible to have the switch bypass the preamp too?

Any help would be really appreciated!

Cheers.

Here is the diagram-

https://i.imgur.com/z8it7y3.gif

ICBM

The switch on the jack plate bypasses the preamp. The input impedance of the preamp circuit will be so high compared to the volume pot (which is normally the load on the pickups) that it doesn’t matter.

You could split the coils of the bridge pickup by connecting the linked white and black wires to ground, or the pickup red wire depending on which coil you need to shut off (I don’t know) but that will also reduce the pickup output and remove the hum cancellation.

There’s a more important aspect of Eric Johnson’s setup that I would do instead - he uses the lower tone control for the bridge pickup not the middle. To do that you move the wire on the pickup selector switch which currently goes to the middle tone pot, to the empty terminal next to it.

Funkfingers

Coil splitting a DiMarzio stacked coils replacement pickup for Stratocaster leaves a working coil of approximately half the height of a traditional single coil. This results in a tone that is not be the same as a vintage unit.

Split coil + pre-amp = loadsa noise.

kriszuki

 @Funkfingers and @ICBM Thanks so much for posting your experitse and advice.