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I'm starting to really need a strat type sound and I don't have a million bucks to spend. My original thought was to just save for nothing in particular until a good HSS strat popped up, but today I started thinking about adding a coil tap or split or whatever you want to call it to get a strat-ish sound from my Gibson ES semi. It might be an inexpensive modification but it's not worth doing if it doesn't make a huge difference to the sound. Anyone have experience with this? Anyone have a late 1970s Gibson with this function? Sound clips? Thanks
note: I will never ever sell or pass this guitar on. Resale value and aesthetics don't matter, this one'll be pryed from my cold dead hands.Last edited by mr quick; 02-16-2018 at 05:13 PM.
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02-11-2018 05:49 PM
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Just one man's opinion FWIW - I'd keep saving and get the strat. What I've found with coil taps on typical PAF type humbuckers, is that you get a lighter kind of tone, with less bass and mids, and less overall volume. Some may find that useful to have as an option, but it just doesn't sound very much like a strat - I say this as someone who does own a strat. But interested to see what others on the forum think, all the same.
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Never heard a coil tap I thought sounded anything like a Strat.
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I‘ve had my share of these things. IMHO with the two humbuckers, four knob Gibson type Layout the Jimmy Page wiring should be standard. This is two coil taps, out of phase and parallel-serial. Having said that - you will never get a satisfying Strat tone out of a Gibson style solid body or semi. At best it will be a lack luster approximation. It is much better to save up and get a Strat for when you want a Strat tone .... just my 0.02$ worth of an opinion.
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Dimarzio Bluesbucker in the bridge might get you in the ballpark without volume loss as mentioned with other pickups. I have not tried it on the neck position. You will not have the special effect from the springs and the vibrato block though that contributes to the strat sound.
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I'd go with the consensus and get an actual Strat. Other guitars just don't get the same sound no matter how you set them up.
You can pick up a Mexican made one for less than $500 if you look around, and the quality is not bad at all. I have mexi strat and a mexi J-bass. They're both very nice pieces. If you want to go even cheaper, you can pick up a Squire for not much money at all. Though a lot of people who do that end up replacing things like pots and tuners, so it might not end up being as cheap as you'd like it to be.
You don't even have to go Fender. G&L makes a Strat-type guitar for $600 new.
Another good option might be a Nashville type Tele. That's a Tele with a Strat pickup in the middle. That would give you a Strat sound as well as a lot of other great useful sounds.
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I too have yet to play or hear a humbucker that comes even in the same galaxy as a real strat. I bought an Indonesian made HSS for a hundred bucks that plays like a dream AND sounds like a strat
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As long as you don't expect a clone of a Strat or a Tele, but just want some single coil goodness, I think it's worth doing, especially if you can solder and do it yourself.
My Guild Bluesbird came with coil taps and they're good! I put a Duncan PRail in the neck position, with the p90 as the tone knob down position and parallel with the tone knob up. The bridge pickup is a Duncan SH16 which is designed to be tapped and does a good job. To me it's a more pleasant sound in the bridge than either a standard Strat or Tele pickup.
You might want to check this out as well:
How To Get More From Your Humbucker: Coil Split | Seymour Duncan
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Even less, on the local Craigslist I have seen them for $375 or so. Leo Fender famously said something like "you can buy one built by Mexicans in the USA or one built by Mexicans in Mexico." The MIM instruments I have played seem just as good as the US-built ones.
Originally Posted by Boston Joe
Heck, even my MIC Affinity Tele is a very good instrument (although I had to sort through a bunch of them to find one without neck problems, for under $150 it was a good intro to Teles for jazz). The US and MIM pickups and electronics are much better, though.
I concur that a split humbucker does not sound like a Strat or Tele pickup. And if you want the 2 & 4 positions you can only get that with the Strat setup.
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i have me an old epi lp special ii, with a bolt on neck and mystery meat body and i threw some sd alnico 2 pros in it. and later, some flippy switches. does it sound like a strat? i don't know. does it sound fendery? maybe? does it imply single coil tones? yes, it does. does it now have a bunch of cool sounds by using the middle position and mixing in the single coil and the humbucker sounds, so much so that i use it more that i have in the past and those tones are actually better and more useful than the full humbucker sounds and it is fairly responsive to the single volume and tone knob also? yes.
and i once had an es333 that i put a tv jones powertron plus in (their most paf-y offering at the time). and i split that. sounded pretty neat. wouldn't depend on that sound, though.
point being, if you need a strat or a tele sound, get one of those. if you want to stretch out your guitar's usefulness, and possibly add some neat tones for recording and for funsies, while not expecting them to be better than the standard sounds or exactly the same as a fender or whatever, then sure. knock yourself out.
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I owned a very early Gibson ES-335TD that featured the coil tap. (It was a '75 that had the tap. Before that one, I had never seen one earlier than '76-'77 that had the coil tap. It was either a prototype or one sent back to Gibson for the job--it was factory work.)
I loved the guitar but never thought that the coil tap made the guitar sound like one of my Stratocasters.
If you want a Stratocaster sound, my suggestion is to pick up even one of the very inexpensive imported Fender Strats, i.e., a Squire. They are adequately good and get THE sound.
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For tonal variety, I've used, not a coil tap, but a series parallel circuit wiring. I get variety and with mixing and blending pickups, I get textures that have a wide expressive range.
A number of years ago I had a guitar that had a DiMarzio Humbucker from Hell. I don't have that guitar anymore but it was a semi and I do remember thinking "Wow that's got the ring of a strat" but that may be my memories playing with me. Anyone familiar with this pickup?
David
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coil splits (a tap is something different!) never really worked for one reason..say your playing through your humbucker with the tone and volume you prefer...hit a switch and go into single coil mode, and your tone and volume (drop) change dramatically....
if you are in the studio, you can work with it to make it work..but live, on the fly?..forget it
however
that's reason why latest pup development has a humbucker that not only splits coil but adds booster coil to the split..so that the difference in tone and volume is not that drastic...while still giving non humbucking single coil tone...prs & a few pup makers are doin it
clever stuff
cheers
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Only a strat sounds like a strat
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ps- don't forget strat also has the 25.5 scale vs (most gibbys) 24.75
big difference tonewise
cheers
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For a cheap but reasonable approximation:
Yamaha Pacifica cheapie Strat copy.
Put a humbucker in the neck position.
Then, use the middle pickup to sound like a Strat and the neck HB to sound, well, more Gibson-like.
This is the setup I've gigging with for the last two years or so.
In practice, I rarely use the middle pickup, but when I do, it sounds more or less like a Strat.
BTW, I have a real Strat, which I don't use, because I couldn't get used to the 9.5 radius.
The Fender sounds better in the midrange than the Yamaha, but I'd give the Yamaha the edge up high.
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I have had a couple of ES347's and a Comins GCS-1. All of them had coil taps, making them very useful, versatile, working man's/woman's guitars. I don't think, for a second, that either could imitate a strat or tele type single coil sound, but I played plenty of James Brown and assorted country tunes on those guitars. Nobody ever rushed the stage to tell me it sounded bad.
My OPINION is you need a solid guitar outfitted with the standard strat-style pickup config to get the authentic tone.
EDIT: Sorry! I just noticed that this almost duplicates Greentone's post above.
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Let me be the first to give you the good news!!! They don't cost a million dollars!! Originally Posted by Marwin Moody
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Squier Classic Vibe or MIM Classic series (if you like vintage specs)
MIM Classic Player (if you want more modern fretboard radius… they might have overdone this on the Classic Player 60s)
Used for not much, available both '50s and '60s, great strats all of them.
Even the Squier Standard I bought for 200-ish dollars out of necessity was a good Strat once I set it up reasonably.
Fender or licensed strats are cheap and plentiful. And as everyone said, the Strat tone is a rather magical combination of that scale, that tremolo bridge, and those single coils (way different from, say, telecaster single coils).
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My first "real' guitar was a new off-the-shelf '79 ES335 with the coil tap. It was nice enough to have a different texture available at the flip of a switch, but it was in no way a substitute "Strat" tone.
PK
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As people have already mentioned, coil splits on any PAF style humbucker sound nothing like a tele or strat pickup.
I used to really like coil splits however I no longer use them - they introduce hum and a less than impressive single coil sound. Compared to a good single coil like a P-90 for example, the 'half' a humbucker sound is pretty underwhelming.
What is much more useful is series/parallel switching - this gives a thinner/brighter single coil-like sound with no hum.
Another alternative that I'm surprised more people haven't adopted is the use of a inductor ala the Bill Lawrence Q-Filter. Simply replace the tone capacitor with the Q filter and you can get a range of thinner sounds, again with no hum added and much less volume drop. With the control on '0' the sound is thin- almost acoustic, on '10' it is the unaffected humbucker sound. In between there are a myriad of quasi-single coil tones to be found.
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Seems like they save the best pieces of wood for the US ones, but yeah, construction-wise, they're solid. Originally Posted by Cunamara
And I mean it's not like they're using bad wood or anything. The neck on my MexiStrat is as solid as any I've seen. Just not as spectacular as my old US made Strat Plus.
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Then get a second-hand Pacifica 112J. They're all over the place for under a Franklin. Originally Posted by Marwin Moody
In a nutshell, not worth it. Originally Posted by Marwin Moody
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The 012 and the 112 are the cheapest in the line. The 012 is the very cheapest -- and that's the guitar I gig with. I bought it to knock around and eventually I realized that it was a better tool for the job than instruments costing far more. Originally Posted by LtKojak
The hardware wasn't great. I had to replace the switch and the output jack. The original HB pickup died and I removed it. It already had replacement tuners when I bought it used. But, the guitar plays fine, intonates perfectly and stays in tune, even with the whammy bar. It seems to me that they did a better job on the wood than the metal. But, the repairs I did were cheap except for the Lil 59 in the neck position. I don't know what the tuners cost, but probably more than the guitar.
The 012 and 112 apparently have the same skinny neck -- which is skinnier than the higher end models. Also, they have been made to different specs at different times (this from a Yamaha rep) so you have to try them out to see what you're getting.
Some might dismiss this suggestion as ridiculous. How could a guitar that cheap be any good? I use it because the neck fits my arthritic hands, but, in fact, the skinny neck probably would have felt great before the arthritis. And, it simply does the job. I wouldn't expect Wes to trade his L5 for it, but it's a good instrument.
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Humbuckers are not tapped. The coils are split. I believe that the screw coil is most commonly the one to be live when split. Single coils are tapped wherein another lead is attached to the windings somewhere between the beginning and the end giving the pickup less static resistance and inductance when the tap is switched on. Gibson has one or more P-90 models with coil taps. Humbuckers that can be split have separate sets of positive and negative leads for each coil. The only humbucker equipped guitar I ever heard that could sound like a good strat was some PRS solid body that had a Strat type pickup in the middle and a five way switch.
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