11. Single Coils

We’ve already learned about how humbuckers are wired, but what about single coils?

Classic single coils have one coil (duh) with two leads. One acts as the ground and the other is connected to the pickup selector switch. A standard Strat wiring harness with a 5 way lever switch looks like this:

The Anti-Hum Effect

Single coils sound amazing and play just as an important roll in the history of Rock as their double coil cousins. And the fact that they produce more background noise hasn’t done anything to diminish it. Nevertheless, manufacturers of single coils are continually working on keeping the hum to a minimum.

The problem is that single coil fans don’t want a double coil sound. So how do you produce a single coil pickup with low background noise without adding another coil? Well it’s nearly impossible to do as it turns out.

The most famous pickups in this range (DiMarzio, Virtual Vintage, Fender Noiseless Vintage Series, Bill Lawrence Keystone, etc.) all use the same trick to try and reduce noise. They take two coils and put them in a single coil housing by stacking them over one another. Different than stacked hi-gain pickups, which were made to fit a humbucker in the bridge position of a Strat style guitar without the need for milling, the coils in virtual single coils are separated by a thick shielding. In this way they have minimal influence on one another. The most important difference between these and humbuckers is the number of turns or twists they have when wound. The result is a nearly authentic single coil sound and Strat legends like Erik Clapton and Jeff Beck have even used this type of pickup in their guitars. If that doesn’t show how good they are then nothing will.

With their two coils and four connection cables, the wiring of virtual single coils is different from genuine ones and is more similar to a humbucker. Because of this manufacturers usually use the same color coding on the wiring for virtual single coils as for their humbuckers.