Category: Wiring Advice

Guitar Pickup Wiring Advice and Guides

Looking for help wiring your guitar pickups? This section provides general wiring advice for Warman® humbuckers and single coil pickups, along with practical ideas for modifying and upgrading your guitar’s electronics.

Whether you’re performing a simple pickup replacement or experimenting with more advanced wiring mods, these guides are designed to help you understand how guitar electronics work and how to get the best tone from your instrument.

Electric Guitar Pickup Wiring Ideas

Pickup wiring is one of the easiest ways to customise your guitar’s sound. With a few simple wiring changes, you can unlock a surprising range of tones.

Some of the common wiring projects covered here include:

  • Basic pickup replacement wiring

  • Phase reversal switches

  • Coil split and coil cut wiring

  • Series and parallel pickup wiring

  • Creating multiple tones from a single humbucker

These modifications allow guitarists to explore different tonal options without replacing their entire guitar.

From Simple Pickup Swaps to Full Guitar Builds

Whether you are:

  • swapping a pickup in your favourite guitar

  • installing Warman humbuckers or single coils

  • adding a new switch or tone control

  • or building a custom guitar from scratch

you’ll find helpful wiring diagrams, tips, and advice here.

Even experienced guitar builders occasionally need a quick wiring reference, and beginners often discover that guitar electronics are much simpler than they first appear.

Make Your Guitar Sound Exactly the Way You Want

Electric guitar wiring doesn’t have to be complicated. With the right guidance and a soldering iron, you can create a guitar that delivers exactly the tone you want.

Explore the guides below to find pickup wiring ideas, modification tips, and practical advice for getting the most out of your Warman pickups.

Who knows — you might even end up building your own screaming tone monster along the way.

Warman® Guitars designs affordable humbucker and single coil pickups for electric guitar upgrades, helping players worldwide improve tone, output, and reliability without paying boutique pickup prices.

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5 way lever switches with 8 connection lugs explained.

And now onward to demystify the not so complex world of all those connection points on the bottom of 5 way import lever switches. Be warned not a lot of tech speak used. These switches are used on 3 pickup guitars to give you the classic 5 tonal combinations of bridge pickup on its own, bridge and middle pickups on together in parallel, middle pickup on its own, middle and neck pickups on together in parallel and lastly neck pickup on its own. For the sake of this explanation the bridge pickup is referred to as POSITION 1 and neck pickup is in POSITION 5 .

We are also going to refer to the connection lugs as either SIDE A ( shown left in the photo ) and SIDE B

Although there are 8 connection lugs racked up across the bottom of the switch you need to be thinking of this as two separate banks of 4 lugs that do not connect to each other. So whilst the 4 pins on the left hand side ( SIDE A ) connect up with each other in various switch positions and the 4 pins on the right ( SIDE B ) connect up with each other in various switch positions each side of the switch works independently of the other.

These types of switches operate on the same basis as the old fashioned Strat 4 lugs per side with its just that all the connectors are inline o e bottom edge of the switch.

The diagram below shows which lugs are connected when the switch is in various positions.

To wire one of these switches up in the traditional 3 pickup Start type switching arrangement goes as follows.

First thing you need to do is solder on a small jumper wire that connects the two middle lugs ( 4 and 5 ) so that both sides of the switch now physically connect up a common feed out. You then wire these two lugs up to the input lug of your volume pot ( assuming you are using just the one volume pot as in a Strat )

Now you hook your 3 pickups into the switch by soldering each of the hot / plus / positive – whatever you care to call them – wires into SIDE A of the switch in the position shown so…….

Neck positive wire goes to input lug 1

Middle positive wire goes to input lug 2

Bridge positive wire goes to input lug 3

SIDE B of the switch is where you take the fees out for whichever pickups you want to have tone controls. Typically Strat type arrangements tend to have tone controls on the neck and middle pickup and the bridge doesn’t have any tone control. I’ve shown all the 3 outputs so that you can choose which have tone controls.

If you want just the middle and neck pickups to have tone controls then obviously you don’t need a wire out for the bridge. There are other possibilities, if you wanted the neck pickup to have its own independent tone control but have the middle and neck share a tone control then you’d take the feed for the neck tone from lug 6 and then, to keep the spaghettification to a minimum, you’d run a jumper wire between lug 7 and 8 with a wire out to the other tone pot.

Thats all there is to it really. Told you it wasn’t that complicated.

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Wiring two pickups and basic controls

Wiring two pickups and basic controls. It’s not rocket science, and nothing to fear. If you can solder, you can wire your guitar.

Wiring two pickups and basic controls. The schematic below shows a two-pickup setup. It has a 3-way selector switch, one volume, and one tone control.

Wiring two pickups and basic controls A Warman guide of how to do it.

It doesn’t matter which brand of pickups you use. Wire colours may differ, but the principles stay the same. Here are some quick tips to guide you.

Checking pickup polarity

Pickups follow the rule: opposites attract.
When using two pickups, you want opposite magnetic poles. Hold their faces together. If they stick, you’re good. That’s north and south attracting.

For three single coils:

  • Bridge should stick to middle.
  • Middle should stick to neck.

With humbuckers, the idea is the same. The screw poles on one should attract to the screw poles on the other.

Wires on single coils

A simple single coil usually has two wires.
Sometimes it’s one cable with inner and outer wires. Sometimes it’s two separate coloured wires.

The inner wire is hot (positive). The outer, wrapped around it, is ground (negative).

It doesn’t matter which you choose as hot. The key is consistency. Use the same wire for hot on all pickups, and the same for ground.

Wires on humbuckers

Humbuckers often have 4 or 5 wires. Here’s the breakdown:

  • The bare wire (often soldered to another) = ground.
  • Two wires soldered together = coil link. Wrap them in tape or heat-shrink. Ignore them for now.
  • The last single wire = hot. This goes to the selector switch or volume input.

That’s all you need for basic wiring. No need to memorise colour codes.

If your humbucker has just one cable, treat it like a single coil. Same rules apply.

Grounding everything

Ground is critical. Miss it, and your guitar will hum like a wasp in a biscuit tin.

Run a wire from the bridge to ground. Make sure all ground points are linked:

  • Pot backs
  • Switch casings
  • Pickup ground wires

Test continuity with a cheap tester. You’ll find them in car parts shops or electronics stores. They have a probe, a light, and a crocodile clip.

Clip to the bridge or a pot back. Touch the probe to each ground point. The light should glow if the connection is good.

A few quid on a tester can save hours of head-scratching.

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Basic guide to Warman wire colours on 4 wire humbuckers.

The Warman twin coil humbuckers all pretty much follow the same wire colour codes as follows.

Bare wire. This is the overall group wire for the pickup and needs to be connected to a common earth point on the guitar. Typically this is the back of a pot.

Black. This is the negative ( – ) wire of the first coil, sometimes called the start wire.

White. This is the positive ( + ) wire of the first coil, sometimes called the finish wire

Red. This is the negative ( – ) wire of the second coil. ( start )

Green. This is the positive ( + ) wire of the second coil ( finish )

To wire this up as standard humbucker with both coils i series. Connect black and bare to the back of one of the pots ( common earth circuit )

Leave red and white joined together , they come pre-soldered to each other . Wrap some insulation tape around this solder joint to avoid accidental shorting our of the coils when you stuff all the wires back into the guitar cavities.

Connect the green wire either to the input lug on you volume pot or the pickup selector switch, this will depend on how your guitar is wired and its control layout .

Single coils

Single coil pickups have just 2 wire coming out of them. This will either be a single twin core cable or two individual leads, depending on model. single cable versions have an inner and outer core to the wire, the inner is the hot wire and the outer is the ground / negative wire. If the pickup has two individual leads then one of these will be black, which is the ground wire, and the other coloured lead will be the hot wire.

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G-rail and neck humbucker. Fancy 5 way switch with coil tap wiring idea.

Had a request for an unusual wiring arrangement for a Guitar with a 5 way switch and a neck pickup and a bridge pickup. It uses a standard 4 each side type of 5 position Strat lever switch.

Bridge pickup is one of our 6 wire G-rails and the neck is another of our humbuckers. The switching gives the following.

Position 1 – both rails of the G-rail wired in series.

Position 2 – coil cuts one rail of the G-rail and activates the alnico section together ( hum cancelling )

Position 3 – alnico section of the G-rail on its own.

Position 4 – coil cuts the neck humbucker and activates the alnico section of the G-rail together ( hum cancelling )

Position 5 – neck humbucker using both coils.

Its kind of wired up a bit HSH Strat like when you think it through with the alnico single coil section of the G-rail acting a bit like the mid position single coil on an HSH Strat.