hideout Posted November 21, 2019 Share Posted November 21, 2019 So, I recently got an Ibanez ARZ200FM in Grey Burst. Beautiful guitar and lovely to play but when my fingers accidentally touched either pickup, it would buzz. Hmmm... So I opened her up and sure enough, the pickups were wired in backwards. Since I was planning on replacing the neck pickup anyway - Love the way Ibanez guitars play but hate their neck pickups. Too muddy and no character. The bridge pickup was fine. Nothing special but I could work with it so I decided to live with it for a while before replacing it. It sounded like a typical bridge humbucker. So when the SD Antiquity Neck arrived I did that installation and corrected the wiring on the bridge pickup. Here's where the total surprise came in. The bridge now sounded bright, jangly, it lost some of its low end but not too much. It was now a very lively yet not ice picky bridge pickup. Sounds almost like a really FAT tele pickup. What I don't understand is how a mere change in its wiring polarity could so dramatically change the tone of this pickup. I changed and experimented with lots of pickups before and had reversed wires intentionally lots of times and have never had a tonal change such as this ever. How is this happenning? Anyone have any ideas? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pianoguyy Posted December 5, 2019 Share Posted December 5, 2019 first, to fix the ibanez "mud", change the magnet in the pickup. it is far cheaper. in fact, i have one where i didn't even buy a magnet. i just swapped the magnets from the two pickups. wiring can tricky. because one thing can feed another thing. so, what you hear isn't this one thing, it is the combination of things. changing one thing, changes them all. and then, sometimes you go messing with "default" jobs. and you find that the original wiring was setup ... a five position switch for 2 humbuckers, allowing coil splitting. but the pickup you want to replace it with isn't designed for coil splitting. So, now, you have two positions that give you grief. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hurghanico Posted December 5, 2019 Share Posted December 5, 2019 rewire both pickups "backwards" as they were and probably the bridge PU will work again as before.. probably they were wired "backward" (as you say) for a reason Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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