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Let Scott here tell you a little something about coil tapping

Few modifications can alter a guitar’s primary tone as much as switching those all-important pickups. Responsible for turning string vibrations into a decipherable electrical signal, there are seemingly hundreds, even thousands of variations out there of the electric guitar pickup. And even as you cipher through all of the different makes and models, there are still plenty of other modifications and design variations that each have their own signature tone characteristics – and we’re not just talking about humbuckers versus single coils here!

With the exception of those fancy new optical pickups or the acoustic-centric variety, all electric guitar and bass pickups pretty much work the same way – a thin copper coil wrapped around magnets that create a magnetic field which produces an electrical signal that can be sent and made into sound by an amplifier – but what many newer players don’t realize that everything from t...

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0 Comments | Posted in h By Mareo Lopez

Guitar Pickups 101 Series: Part 6 - Coil Tapping Explained


Don’t get it confused, coil-tapping is NOT the same as coil-splitting, make sure you get it right. Coil-splitting is something that is done to humbuckers, coil-tapping is done to single coil pickups.


Seymour Duncan Antiquity for Strat has option for coil tap

When the single coil pickup is being made, as the coil is being wound, an output is tapped into the coil halfway up, and an additional output is tapped in at the top of the pickup. What this does is make it so that one coil actually has two different levels of output (half of the total, and the total ). You could also think of it as, fifty percent power and full power.

To be able to access these two different outputs, you need a switch to jump between the two. This practice of coil-tapping allows you to have a bigger, darker sound when at full output, but also to switch to a brighter more vintage sound at half the output.

Essentially it turns each single-coil pickup into two ...

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0 Comments | Posted in h By Greg Marchini