Recently i installed my spare pickups to my Fernandes FR 55, they are Duncan Designed hotrails pickups and a quadrail pickup(brand unknown). It is temporary until i get the pickups i want,though. but here’s some problems i encounter when i installed them:
– can’t find the right phase for all pickups
– cable colors are confusing
well, it’s actually only two problems, but i spent the whole day to get the right phase for these pickups. you can solve this problem with an AVOmeter, but since i don’t have it, i have to try it one-by-one with cablejacks and miniamp to test the connectivity.
and this is what i got from that:
FYI: i forgot to draw the unwrap cable output from pickups, but i solder them all to ground. and consider that some unknown brand using different cable color for hot and ground. this was my real problem with the unknown brand quadrail pickup.. it has the same cables colors, but when i connected them according to seymour duncan cable coding, it is gone out of phase. the pickup wiring diagram above is exactly what I’ve done to get the right phase.
the sound i got from that pickup wiring diagram:
i use the coiltap to split all the pickups. so in lifted-coiltap, i have S-S-H pickups formation. AND, in pushed-coiltap, i have the H-H-HH pickups formation.
the output is actually awesome, BUT, my pickups are the default factory ones, so, their sound quality isn’t that good. can’t get more clarity, since the default pickups usually are average-to-bad pickups. it’s muddy, but i can overcome that with compression pedal.
but, i tell you, this could be awesome if you have high-quality hotrails and quadrail pickups. the hum-cancelling works perfectly. there are no noise on my guitar sound output. the tone is actually hum-free with very good sustain. but i need better hotrails and quadrail, though, to get the wood tone comes out of my guitar. (my fernandes is maple neck and mahogany body, tough one)