Changing the pickup
Electric Guitar Pickups
An electric guitar pickup detects the vibrations of the strings electronically and the output signal is fed to an amplifier. The magnetic pickup is mounted under the strings on the guitar. Below is a picture of a guitar pickup:
There are many makes of pickups and they vary in sound reproduction.
Depending on your preferences and the style of sound you want to reproduce you may want to change your pickup (or one of the pickups) in your guitar.
What you will need:
Obviously once you have decided on the pickup (or pair of pickups as sometimes they come on pairs) you will need to take your old pickup
out of your guitar and replace with the new one.
It is important that the replacement pickups fits your guitar so you need to be 100% sure on this!!
You will need a solder iron and some solder to solder the connections.
You will need a screwdriver.
As you will probably be taking off your strings, it may be an ideal time to put in a fresh pack of strings.
The pickup needs to be wired in. The circuit diagram for my Ibanez RD370DX is available from the Ibanez site
To take the old pickup out:
Not sure if the pickup can be taken out with the strings in place but I would take off the strings and the tremolo arm.
If you look at the pickup next to the bridge you will notice it is in a case held by 4 corner screws. The other two screws hold the pickups
in the case and can be adjusted to bring the pickups nearer to the strings (or the opposite). Those two screws have springs underneath the case so when you take off the case be careful as they may fly off.
On the underside of the guitar you will need to remove the cover that hide the electronics.
Remove the 4 screws holding the cover plate.
Now we can see all the wiring, the selector switch and the two pots.
At this point we need to identify the wiring for the pickups we are removing. We will be referring to the circuit diagram listed earlier in this page.
The bridge pickup pair has 3 wires, white, red and black.
Looking at the selector switch (bottom left in the picture above - Pin1 extreme left and pin 8 extreme right) , the white wire goes to pin3 and the red goes to pin 8 for the bridge pickup.
The ground goes to the Volume control pot ....you will identify this when you have unscrewed the pickup to be taken out.
Unsolder the wires that belong to the removed pickups.
It may be idea to make note of where all the wires are soldered to in case your guitar is wired differently.
You will need to cut off the plastic tie wrap to do the wiring comfortably.
When soldering make sure that the joints are good as this can lead to a dry joint.
One thing you may want to do before you install the new pickups is to test them ...you can do this by
connecting each pickup (red or white wire) and ground to the amp input ....via a guitar jack.
Just managed to changed the INF4 out of an RG370 and replaced with Seymour Duncan (diagrams via link below)
http://www.seymourduncan.com/support/wiring-diagrams/
http://www.seymourduncan.com/support/wiring-diagrams/schematics.php?schematic=2hum_1vol_1tone_super5way
OK to take off the old pickups I had to loosen the strings ....at this point the floating bridge is pulled back by the springs as the string tension is no longer there.
Remove the 4 philips screws, this will remove the cover of the pickups.
Remove the two middle screws, this will remove the pickups ...careful not to loose the 2 coiled springs under the pickups.
After this you can clearly identify where the wiring goes to the underside (the 2 pots and the switch are located here)
The underside:
In my case we were swapping pickups on a left handed guitar so bridge and neck pickups were revesely wired at the switch side.
So we were dealing with the thick green cable which had connections to pin 1 and 6 (plus ground to the pot)
Removal:
To remove the old pot you will need to unsolder the old wiring belonging to the pickup. Do not cut the wires as this leaves an extra lump of wire that can pick up noise.
Installation:
Firstly feed the wires for the new pickup thru the small hole where the wiring goes into.
At this point I screwed in the pickup so that it was not hanging loose when I soldered the wiring.
The wiring:
The SD pickups have 4 wires plus a shield. Bear in mind the switch in the Ibanez in nothing like the one shown on the circuit diagram for the SD pickups.
This is how I wired this up.
Connect the Black of your SD pickup to where the drawing shows a white wire. (pin 1 on the switch for the neck pickup)
Connect the Red and White of your SD pickup to where the drawing shows a red wire. I soldered these pair together. Make sure the joint solders well and give it about 10 seconds for it to cool down before you test it to make sure it has bonded well. (pin 6 on the switch for the neck pickup)
Connect the Green and Bare of your SD pickup to where the drawing shows a gray wire and solder (this goes to Ground on the Volume Pot).
When you are done use a couple of tie-wraps to tidy the cables up.
Tested the unit and the pickups are working fine.
Black to 1 Red&White to 6 Green&Bare to Ground (for Neck pickups)
Black to 3 Red&White to 8 Green&Bare to Ground (for Bridge pickups)