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I'm a HUGE fan of "less is more" especially when it comes to gear, recording and touring. I like to use single coil and humbucker loaded guitars when recording as well has a fat sound of a hollowbody but without the feedback so to solve my challenge I bought a Gibson Midtown Custom and loaded it with coil tapped Lollar Imperials and I've never looked back not needing two guitars to get the job done. For those who don't know coil tapping is a way of wiring humbucker pickups and with the pull of a push/pull volume pot its switched from single coil to humbucker and back, the wiring and pots needed is a very small investment. The Gibson Midtown Custom is a cross between a Les Paul and a 335 with a carved out solid bodie with a solid one piece cap and F holes.

This link is to a tune I've been working on recently using the above guitar with the rhythm tracks single coil and the lead humbucker...

Lollar makes great pickups. Having the coil taps on a Gibson style guitar with 2 humbuckers makes a lot of sense. Pretty typical to put a tapped 'bucker' in the bridge of a strat too; tap it to run with the middle pickup in position 4, then go full on bridge humbooger in position 5.

teleblaster wrote:Lollar makes great pickups. Having the coil taps on a Gibson style guitar with 2 humbuckers makes a lot of sense. Pretty typical to put a tapped 'bucker' in the bridge of a strat too; tap it to run with the middle pickup in position 4, then go full on bridge humbooger in position 5.

The pickups were $300 and the install was about $50 so that's half the price or less of a second single coil guitar and you don't have to put one down to pick up another in a live setting!

Did you mean Coil Splitting?

Here's the difference,

Coil splitting is the practice of shutting off (or otherwise fading out) one coil of a humbucker, leaving behind a single coil for a brighter tone. Coil splitting is often confused with a single coil option known as coil tapping, in much the same way that the terms ‘vibrato bar’ and ‘tremolo bar’ are considered interchangeable even though only one is technically correct. So what is coil tapping, and how is it different to coil splitting?

Coil tapping is when a wire runs off of the pickup windings at a certain point, somewhere short of the full amount. This means you can install a switch to select between a single coil pickup’s full output or a lower output, giving you two distinct levels of power from one pickup.

This is from Seymour Duncan website

Just thought I'd mention it.

RockChild56 wrote:Did you mean Coil Splitting?

Here's the difference,

Coil splitting is the practice of shutting off (or otherwise fading out) one coil of a humbucker, leaving behind a single coil for a brighter tone. Coil splitting is often confused with a single coil option known as coil tapping, in much the same way that the terms ‘vibrato bar’ and ‘tremolo bar’ are considered interchangeable even though only one is technically correct. So what is coil tapping, and how is it different to coil splitting?

Coil tapping is when a wire runs off of the pickup windings at a certain point, somewhere short of the full amount. This means you can install a switch to select between a single coil pickup’s full output or a lower output, giving you two distinct levels of power from one pickup.

This is from Seymour Duncan website

Just thought I'd mention it.

That's neat Seymour went ahead and defined the terms, I remember when we first started doing it we called it tapping and it mean both on/off switching one out of two coils of a humbucker and blending the amount of one of the two. I personally mean both but I think for most people having the simple on/off would be an excellent start as you don't need to mode the guitar to fit more knobs.

Yea there is some confusion in the terms the thing is that a single coil PUP can be coil tapped as well.
I do believe.

RockChild56 wrote:Yea there is some confusion in the terms the thing is that a single coil PUP can be coil tapped as well.
I do believe.

THAT I was unaware of...