Ah – the dark art of what colour wire goes where !
Well not really, its actually pretty easy to work this out without being given the exact wire colours on a pickup, provided its come straight out of the packet or still wired up as standard. Not rocket science, just a bit of common sense. Heres a photo of our standard end of the wire.
As you can see there are 5 separate wires sticking out the end of the main cable insulation.
Lets take that black one first that is connected to the bare wire. The bare wire is always the overall chassis earth of the pickup and is the one that is soldered to the baseplate of the pickup so its going to have to connect to the earth circuit on your guitar. The black wire is pre-soldered onto it so, here’s the clue, thats the negative wire of the humbucker as we have already connected it to the other earth wire and it needs to connect to the earth circuit of the guitar – that’s kind of why we solder them together before they get shipped out.
You know its a 2 coil pickup, as you bought a humbucker, so theres got to be a connection between those 2 separate coils else the whole thing wont work right ? As you can see there are 2 wires connected up together that aren’t part of the earth connection of the guitar – Bingo – the red and white wires link the 2 coils of the humbucker together.
The leaves us with just one wire unaccounted for and that’s the green. By a simple process of elimination that has to be the output / hot wire of the pickup. Thats the one that’s going to have to go to either your selector switch or the input lug on your volume pot.
Told you it was quite easy to work out.
Gets a little more complex working out which are the hot and negative wires of each coil but its still not rocket science. You already know which is the negative of the first coil – the black wire. You also know which is the positive / hot wire of the second coil – the green wire. Now you’ll need to get some sort of continuity tester or multi meter to help with this bit and you’ll need to separate the white wire from the red. You can usually just pull them apart.
Start by connecting one lead from your multimeter to the black wire ( the negative of the first coil ) and then connect the other lead to either the red or the white wire to see which one gives you a continuity signal. That identifies the hot wire from the first coil – if you don’t want to know the answer without testing then look away now and don’t read this bit – its going to be the white wire on our pickups. You’ve got a continuity signal then between the back wire and the white, so you now know the negative and positive leads of the first coil.
You don’t even need to test for the positive and negative leads of the second coil as you already know that the green wire is the positive lead of coil 2 so therefore the red wire just has to be the negative lead of the 2nd coil.
Also if you want a quick and dirty method of working out which pickup is the bridge and neck, and you can’t be bothered to turn them over to look for the B or N stamp on the back, then matched humbucker pairs have red heat shrink on the end of the cable and neck ones have black heat shrink.