Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

Dane and Bruce never fail to impress:

Very cool, Matthew! Black pickguard and chrome-on-black TRC are a perfect match for the Jetglo body! Is the pickguard a normal black one or a plexi one with black paint under? Got any coil-split feature with the HB1 pickups?

The coil-split feature adds so much sonic possibility to a humbucker! It should be a standard feature for the 4004 basses, IMHO.

Yup, Dane, love the shape of the guard you made for The Queen!

How do you make an HB1 a split coil?

psychomatthias wrote:Dane and Bruce never fail to impress:

Man that looks fimiliar....

Sweet looking bass Matthew

The HB-1 is made, like most humbuckers, with two coils inside, on the HB-1, all the wires come out to the end of the cable, making it easy to "split" the coils. All you have to do is take the two wires that are soldered together at the end of the cable (covered with black heat shrink tubing) and either tie those to ground or tie them to the "hot" lead from the pickup. You then have a single coil pickup because the other coil is shorted out.

On a 4001 or 4003 you can use the spare lug on the pickups tone control to act as a coil tap. The coil will split when the tone is turned full up. Turning the tone back a bit (not much) will bring the pickup back to full HB.
The neck HB-1 on my orrible 74 4001 is wired as such.
Tapped HB-1s have the shine, control and balance of an old toaster, plus a slight farty grit from the Hi-gain when you give it a push. A very underated pickup!

I agree that 4004s should have taps built into them (just via the tone control would be fine thanks, and only on the neck pickup)

Eden.

This is all very interesting.

Im about to take a router to my 4004L to open up the control compartment to utilize all the wiring options.

So much versatility, it just seems like the right thing to do.

Why do you need to make the control cavity bigger to take advantage of all the wiring options? Here, we have switchable single coil/HB for each pickup, switchable original/4002 tone circuit for each pickup, switchable Ric-O-Sound or mono output, and stacked tone/volume pots for each pickup. All in the original cavity space...

Thats some fine work there CJ.

I just like plenty of room thats all.

I'd listen to CJ, while it's doubtful you make an error or the lost wood causes any harm to the resonance, there's always the slim possibility that it will.

aceonbass wrote:Scott, if you need a little more room in there, trace around the cavity cover and then route out the cavity 1/4" inside the outline. This will give you quite a bit more room.
CJ, where did you solder the red and blue wires from the HB1? On one of my basses the red is soldered to ground and the blue to the selector switch. The bass doesn't hum or anything, but it seems counter intuitive to wire a + wire to ground and a - wire to hot.

I soldered mine the same way it came from the factory, red is hot, blue to ground, and then, of course, the center through the switch to ground for single coil. I toyed with the idea of having the single coil switch able to either ground the center or connect it to hot, but couldn't find the proper switch with a center OFF position. I figured it wouldn't really matter a lot anyway.

As for whether you put red to ground or blue, it really shouldn't matter a whole lot, at least as far as noise in concerned. What does happen is that you invert the phase of the signal from one pickup with respect to the other. This may give you a different sound due to the different harmonics that get canceled/enhanced due to comb filtering effects. This will only happen if you combine the two pickups in mono, it'll do next to nothing with R-O-S assuming you use 2 separate amps. I actually thought about adding another switch for phase reversal, but I wasn't sure I could actually fit that in there too...