Added Range for Humbuckers

For decades, if you bought a guitar with humbuckers, you had to live with the trademark humbucker sound, which is fat with lots of midrange complexity. If you wanted the brighter sound of a single-coil pickup, you had to buy another guitar. Fortunately, in the 1980s, manufacturers came up with a way to add additional sounds to a humbucker-equipped instrument. It was called “coil tapping.” In essence, this split (or “tapped”) one of the coils in the humbucker, essentially turning it into a single-coil. So if you own a guitar with two humbuckers, you might want to look into replacing the existing set with a pair of modern humbucking pickups, many of which offer coil-tapping (please note that this is a job for a qualified guitar tech). You might also consider purchasing a guitar in which the humbuckers are already wired for coil-tapping, like the PRS McCarty. But wait, before you start thinking this will give you the sounds of both, say, a Les Paul and a Strat, you’d be disappointed. While coil tapping does indeed produce a brighter, thinner sound, it will never get you fully into Strat territory. This is because of the way the magnets are actually placed in each type pickup. On a humbucker, the magnets are normally placed under the coils, while a classic Strat pickup has six individual rod magnets that pass through its single coil, which produces a very focused magnetic field and thus more of the bright transient response. Still, the majority of people out in the real world won’t know the difference when they hear it and having additional tones available on any guitar is clearly a bonus.