[NewPickupDay] There's a Benedetto B7 in my Ibanez!

[nevershouldhavesoldit]

[EDIT WITH BREAKING NEWS!] None of the wiring diagrams that I had for the B7 was correct. I used it on stage for the first time last week and it was as noisy as a single coil around the overhead stage lighting, wireless IEM rigs etc and the major electrics outside the wall (cell tower, 440V commuter train lines etc)! Long story short: I finally called Benedetto the morning after, when Duncan's tech line was useless and the web had nothing to offer. The correct wiring for the current model of the B6 or B7 as a humbucker is black for output and bare for ground - they stopped using 4 leads plus ground some time ago in favor of a 3 wire setup. The white wire runs from the junction between the two coils and will shunt one coil if grounded. It should be capped and left unused, unless you want to connect it to ground through a switch so you can also get a single coil sound. The sound of the full humbucker is similar in character to the single coil sound you'll hear below, in that it's detailed and clean. But it's also richer, fuller, quieter, and (as you'd expect) louder for the same settings. On my Little Jazz, I get a great amplified archtop tone with a bit o'thunk and a bit more wood with the bass back to 10 o'clock and the mid and treble at noon. Here's a link to the thread I started on this - it has the correct Benedetto wiring diagram that Jackson Evans sent me.


I ordered my AF207 from 8th Street immediately after reading the announcement of its introduction in Guitar Player in '96. It arrived a year later, and it's been my main jazz box ever since. I always used a bass amp, and the guitar seemed fine until I downsized and went to guitar amps. By the time I got to my DV Little Jazz and Jazz 12, there were some obvious flaws centered on a shrill high end and a flabby bottom. But I always asssumed (there's that terrible word again!) that the pickup in my guitar was specially chosen and/or created for this guitar.

I learned several weeks ago that my pickup is a ceramic DiMarzio Blaze! Why Ibanez put this sledgehammer pickup into a truly fine jazz guitar is well beyond my pay grade. But thanks to a few JGO regulars, I just got and installed a Benedetto B7. I was able to use the original wood surround, although I had to use the silver-toned suspension screws that came with it because the tapped threads in the flanges are a different size. Now it's a real jazz guitar!



The guitar is made amazingly well! The pots are wrapped in black insulating tape under a cocoon of what feels and looks like very heavy aluminum foil with adhesive on one side. Interestingly enough, the DiMarzio appears to have been wired to use only one of the two windings - the red wire from the pickup runs to the signal lug, and the black and white wires are soldered together and taped off while the green and bare wires are grounded.



The B7 is a wonderful pickup! I still need to lower the bass side a little more, but it's amazingly balanced and mellow despite being almost clinically clean. With the DiMarzio, there's a haze over the sound that's gone with the Benedetto. Dialing back the treble a bit gives a more classic jazzy thunk, but the open sound really makes the laminated top sound a bit more woody. Here are clips of a snippet of A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square as close as I could make them to each other. The first one (stock) was recorded months ago with volume wide open and tone on 6 because it was shrill above that. For the second one (B7), the volume and tone pots are both wide open. These were both recorded through my Little Jazz, feeding a TASCAM DR40x via balanced DI with the same settings, normalized to the same -1 dB peak:

First, the stock DiMarzio:


Then the B7:


And here's a brief snippet of Yardbird Suite from the B7, recorded with the internal mics on the TASCAM in front of my RE Bass 10 driven by my DV Raw Dawg 250. The treble is rolled back to 7 on the guitar, and the pickup is now adjusted almost where I want it. I think I need to lower the bass side by a turn of the screw:

[sgosnell]

That DiMarzio wiring is standard. The two coils are wrapped separately, each with a starting and ending end. In some humbuckers the ends are connected inside the cover, but in some both ends of both coils are extended outside, which allows for coil splitting if desired. If there is no coil split switch, the ends are just soldered together outside the pickup, often at the end of the wires, hidden inside shrink wrap or such. That's probably the way the B7 does it, because that's what I've seen on the B6. Benedetto used to use the tone control to provide coil splitting capability, but has since ceased doing that, because it's probably more trouble than it's worth, and can cause warranty issues. The pots they were using for the tone control seemed to have quality control issues, and on my Bambino Deluxe it resulted in the shaft being very loose, vibrating with the top, and causing very annoying buzzes. Fixing the pot fixed the buzz. But back to the DiMarzio, IME that's the way most humbuckers are manufactured, to allow for an easy way to get a coil split and single-coil sound, sort of. It's just a feature that's cheap to implement and advertise. It's more work to solder the wires together inside the pickup, and labor costs money anywhere.

To me, the DiMarzio sounds somewhat muddy, probably because of the tone setting. IMO the B6 (or B7, probably) sounds better wired in the Benedetto scheme, posted in other threads. It lets me roll the volume back quite a bit without affecting the tone much. I think it sounds better with the volume back to around 50% and the tone full open, and AFAIK that's the way it was designed. That puts the resonant frequency in about the right place for a good jazz tone. I don't know how you wired yours, and you may not want to deal with changing anything, it's just the way I like, which isn't necessarily anyone else's.

[jim777]

The Blaze was developed for Steve Vai and the Universe series of 7 string solid bodies from Ibanez back in the late 80's. It's an awesome rock pickup IMHO, but I have no idea why they chose it to go in a hollow body lol. It literally was designed for something completely different.

So, are you going to go back to the Ibby, or switch back and forth between the Ibby and the Tele? OR, are you going to make come and see to find out myself?

[nevershouldhavesoldit]

That DiMarzio wiring is standard. The two coils are wrapped separately, each with a starting and ending end. In some humbuckers the ends are connected inside the cover, but in some both ends of both coils are extended outside, which allows for coil splitting if desired. If there is no coil split switch, the ends are just soldered together outside the pickup, often at the end of the wires, hidden inside shrink wrap or such. That's probably the way the B7 does it

I truly appreciate the info and assistance! But I knew all that in principle - I was misled by the fact that even humbuckers from the same maker differ in color coding from model to model and year to year. A little more research turns up a total lack of consistency in color codes for pickup wiring. Just like the current wiring diagram for the B6/7 on the SD site, the old instructions for the Blaze (which is no longer on the DiMarzio website and apparently no longer available) showed the red and white wires soldered and taped, and the output going through black. A more recent one (below) shows red as the output, which is how it was wired in mine. So it may have been wired as a full humbucker. I can't tell without measuring the coil resistance (which I'll do for fun when I get down to our storage locker and find my old VOM) because the period correct code shows red as the output from one coil while the more recent one shows red as the full HB output lead. And this was an OEM pickup made just for Ibanez and apparently used only in the AF207 - so there's absolutely no info available on what's inside.

Here are just a few of the wiring codes and schemes in current and recent use:





Warman:


Worse yet (as has been mentioned by others on JGO), the Benedetto B6/B7 now has only 3 leads! Here's the SD wiring diagram for the B7 on the site right now - notice that red and white are joined:



I called Duncan to find out which was the correct hot lead, and the guy who answered the tech phone told me it should have 4 conductors. He was unaware that they'd changed to 3, and he told me to use the white wire as the output, which is wrong. I learned this the hard way and had to take it all apart again to reverse the black and white wires.

So in the immortal words of Roseanne Roseannadanna........

[sgosnell]

The SD Benedetto pickups have long had 3 wires. The bare and green wires go to ground, and the black is hot. I prefer to attach it to the right terminal of the volume pot, looking at it from the bottom with the shaft pointing away, and the center terminal going to the output jack hot. That's how Benedetto wires it, and I like it, but there are other wiring schemes, of course. But green and bare are ground, and black is hot. Just like on a standard AC outlet - green is ground, black is hot, and white is neutral, but in this case both white and red are soldered together. Those wires are present, just hidden away.
And yes, it's a total pain that pickup wire colors seem to be totally random. I had an Eastman that turned out to be wired incorrectly, resulting in what I considered to be inferior sound. I discovered that when reinstalling the pickup after having replaced it with something else to try to improve it. I couldn't remember the exact wiring offhand, so I looked at the manufacturer's website, and found the correct way to wire it, which gave the sound I had originally wanted. Eastman had wired it wrong in the factory,

[nevershouldhavesoldit]

The SD Benedetto pickups have long had 3 wires. The bare and green wires go to ground, and the black is hot. I prefer to attach it to the right terminal of the volume pot, looking at it from the bottom with the shaft pointing away, and the center terminal going to the output jack hot. That's how Benedetto wires it, and I like it

And that's how I wired it, once I discovered that the tech guy at Duncan didn't know what he was talking about. He was so insistent that a B7 should have 4 leads plus ground that he actually questioned whether I was sure I knew what pickup I had and whether it might be a fake. When I reassured him that I'd just gotten it new from Djangobooks, he backed off a bit and told me rather brusquely that the white lead was the ouput. He then said that he'd have to check on this, because "...if they changed it, they should have told me" - and he hung up.

Fortunately, I love it - so all's well that ends well.

PS: I notice that the Bravo diagram you attached also shows 4 leads, with red and white joined. This is how I got the idea that the original pickup was wired for SC use. From now on, I'll use my VOM to check every pickup I use before soldering anything.

[nevershouldhavesoldit]

TSo, are you going to go back to the Ibby, or switch back and forth between the Ibby and the Tele?

One of the reasons I used the Tele for everything was that I didn't have a decent case for safe all weather transport of the AF. I have the OHSC, but it's hard to maneuver in the confines of my corner of the stage, and traditional hard cases do get a bit beat up from frequent outside use. This is why I decided to get a good gig bag when we started the Thursday night jazz sessions. I bought a nice high end RoadRunner that wouldn't fit in my trunk (yes, I should have checked first!) I really wanted a leather one from ProBag, but the cost was / is pretty high - so I just ignored my desire to bring an archtop and used my solid bodies. When it got to be too much for me to resist, I bought a Mono M80 Vertigo bag that's truly excellent. I can lift the guitar out of the top on our little stage without whacking it on everything around me. I've kept it pristine for 25 years and don't want to start beating it up now.

I hope this knowledge won't keep you from coming over, Jim. Bring your guitar, for pete's sake!

[Zigracer]

Nice mod. I like the sound, although the recording of the old pup doesn’t sound bad either. I like the B6 in my Bravo Deluxe. They are very nice pups.

Thanks again for your 7 string advice. I can’t put my Eastman 7 down. I am so intrigued by the thing. BTW, what do you do to stay out of the way of a bass player when playing the 7? Do you just not play the low A string on the first five frets, or just avoid bass runs?

Edit: Didn’t mean to hijack your pickup thread. I just got carried away.?

[nevershouldhavesoldit]

Nice mod. I like the sound, although the recording of the old pup doesn’t sound bad either. I like the B6 in my Bravo Deluxe. They are very nice pups.

Thanks again for your 7 string advice. I can’t put my Eastman 7 down. I am so intrigued by the thing. BTW, what do you do to stay out of the way of a bass player when playing the 7? Do you just not play the low A string on the first five frets, or just avoid bass runs?

Edit: Didn’t mean to hijack your pickup thread. I just got carried away.?

No worries, mate - the forum is here for us to express our thoughts!

The 7th string has different roles, depending on what’s coming from bass and/or keys. I rarely touch it through choruses and solos where the bass player, organist or keyboard is playing a bass line. And except for an occasional wide open inversion on only 2 or 3 strings, I don’t use the low end at all in chorded melody with a bass player. But during bass solos, I’ll lay down a foundation and often even a walking line plus spare comping if the bassist solos in his / her upper register. It works great with a bassist who also solos with double/triple stops and even bigger chords. I’m fortunate to play regularly with a bass player (George Livanos) who uses his instrument fully. We’ve been playing together in different bands for many years and hear where each of us is going, often bars before it happens. Ron Eschete and Todd Johnson have been my inspiration for this for years - they make the most beautiful music together!

This is one of the reasons I love the B7. The low end from the Blaze was flabby and mushy, and no amount of adjusting changed that. With the B7 in the AF and the pickup height fairly low on the bass end, I can use more of the bottom because it’s as well defined as the rest of the range and doesn’t boom at all. It’s truly balanced and neutral. The highs from the Blaze sizzled worse than a sibilant soprano, especially if picked but even with gentle fingerstyle playing. And if I dialed that out by cutting treble in guitar or amp, the highs sounded very dull. Now that’s fixed too.

[Zigracer]

Thanks. And BTW, those AF207 models are nice. I'm my second Ibanez GB10. Ibanez - or their contracted factory just makes some great instruments.