If you're gonna have a purple Strat...

[duhvoodooman***]

...you might as well have a SERIOUSLY purple Strat:



DiMarzio Air Norton humbucker (white, F-spaced) installed at the bridge position, with custom violet pearloid H-S-S pickguard from Warmoth. Also changed the single coil pickup covers and the control knobs to white. I am well aware this look won't be everybody's cup o'tea, but I really like it!

I still need to do some wiring work to split the bridge pickup coils in the #2 switch position to get as much "quack" as possible there. I had a diagram for that wiring change for a standard Strat 5-way switch, but the Squier CV's use a different switch with all the lugs on one side. Rather than try to figure it out on the fly and possibly bugger it up, I just wired the humbucker for normal operation temporarily, and I'll figure out the correct wiring for the coil split at my leisure. Incidentally, the DiMarzio humbuckers are out of phase with the Squier single coils if you wire them per the DiMarzio standard installation instructions. I had to switch the hot and ground connections at the switch, but at least I knew that beforehand from THIS TEST METHOD. No more finding out that I have a phase problem after the guitar is back together and plugged in! This is particularly helpful for Strats, where you have to remove the strings and take the entire pickguard off to get at the pickups & controls wiring.

[Eric***]

Very cool. So I take it you will need to do some of the more intense modifications you touched upon in your other thread, yes? Do you need to do any flipping or swapping of pickups or anything due to the polarity differences or anything?

[Robert****]

Candy guitar.

[duhvoodooman***]

...So I take it you will need to do some of the more intense modifications you touched upon in your other thread, yes? Do you need to do any flipping or swapping of pickups or anything due to the polarity differences or anything?

In this case, all I needed to do was switch the hot & ground connections for the DiMarzio humbucker vs. the stock installation instructions. Not only does that put the humbucker output in phase with the output of the CV Strat's neck and middle pickups, but it will also keep the #2 position of the pickup selector hum cancelling when the humbucker coil is split. This is important to me because I will next be wiring the 5-way switch so that the coils are automatically split at position #2, to get the "max quack" from the bridge-middle pickup combination.

Depending upon the phase and magnetic polarity of the middle single coil in a Strat or similar guitar with single coil pickups, you can run into four possible combinations of the signal phase and magnetic polarities with a split-coil humbucker. It can be:

1. In phase with the middle pickup and hum cancelling (the desired case)
2. In phase with the middle pickup but not hum cancelling
3. Out of phase with the middle pickup but hum cancelling
4. Out of phase with the middle pickup and not hum cancelling (a total FAIL!)

Fortunately, with a 4-conductor humbucker of the type you use for coil-splitting, any of these four are possible, depending on how the 4 leads are connected to the switch and to each other (i.e. the "series link" between the two humbucker coils). As long as you know how the coils of the humbucker relate to the middle single coil, both in terms of signal phase and magnetic polarity, you can wire in the humbucker to get that "desired case" output. And the phase and polarity are easily determined by simple test methods before you make the connections. That's how I determined that I needed to swap the hot and ground leads when I installed the Air Norton last night.

[ZMAN]

"Purple Haze all in my eyes,
don't know if it's day or night,
you've got me blowing, blowing my mind
is it tomorrow or just the end of time?"

Definitely got this vibe!

[marnold***]

How do you like that Air Norton? Isn't that rather PAF like?

[duhvoodooman***]

It's quite a bit hotter than a PAF with a DC resistance of about 12.6, but it's an alnico 5 magnet, so it doesn't sound as bright & aggressive as a ceramic magnet humbucker. DiMarzio rates it as "medium output", but it still has a very nice clean tone. From the DiMarzio product page:

"The Air Norton™ started out simply to be the Airbucker™ version of the Norton®. We thought it would make a distinctive-sounding bridge pickup with high-gain amps, but we soon discovered that it’s a radically neat neck pickup, too. The tone is deep and warm, but not muddy. It’s hot, but not distorted. It’s even got cool harmonics, which are really unusual for a neck humbucker. The patented Air Norton™ magnetic structure reduces string-pull, so sustain is improved; and pick attack and dynamics are tremendously controllable and expressive. "

It's commonly use as a bridge pickup when paired with vintage-style pickups, or used at the neck position with hotter humbuckers at the bridge. Obviously, I'm doing the former.