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Cutlass HSS Single Coil Swap - keeping Silent Circuit with 2-wire pickups

A

Altmondo

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Feb 11, 2020
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This question is sorta floating around, but I haven't been able to exactly decipher how to swap the stock single coils (3 wires) with 2-wire single coils, and keep the silent circuit.

I have seen beej mention that the silent circuit goes to the ground on the pickups - I'm just not exactly sure how to physically wire that up.
The green and grey wires both go to the circuit board, and the red hots go to the switch.

Thank You!
JB
 
The old style silent circuit on (before the Cutlass came out) had the pickups grounded through the silent ciruit unit. There is no need to worry about that here and the pickups will just go to the circuit board. I would assume that if you have a standard 2-wire pickup it connects simply to the switch and to the appropriate "G" terminals on the circuit board.

BUT...

I don't know how the third wire on the stock pickups was involved in the silent circuit and buffer circuit, so I cannot tell you what to expect. I would contact Customer Service for details.
 
I assume the third wire is shielding for the pickup, which would normally go to ground (not the Silent Circuit).

If you're replacing with unshielded, 2-wire pickups, just omit that wire.
 
That worked perfectly!

I dropped in a TV Jones HSS set I never wound up using on a different project.
Dead Silent!

I really have to hand it to EB - I’d say the TVJ setup does have a different sound, mostly the FilterTron. The Singles have a slightly different sonic profile, maybe slightly more ‘open’ sounding, but it’s not strikingly different.

That being said, I personally would NOT spend the dough on this swap if I didn’t already have the set sitting around.

In comparison, when I’ve swapped pickups on a run of the mill S-style guitar it was a major difference.
 
Reviving old thread…. I have read a bunch of posts and I am still confused (it’s a Me problem, not a You problem…)

I want to swap the neck single coil in a Cutlass RS HSS with a two wire single coil from Dimarzio. Do I just hook up the red and the green and ignore the 3rd wire? Will the silent circuit still work? If so will it affect the tone in the new pickup much? Thx

I will in all likelihood want to put the stock one back in at some point.
 
Basically, yes. The third wire is just a 'shield'. It's just wraps around the other wires to block external interference. All you need to function is the two signal wires from the pickup.

The hot goes to the switch. The ground goes to the pad on the PCB.

The SC is a 'dummy coil', it senses noise but not signal (it's a coil with no magnet). However, the twist on it is that the dummy coil is isolated from the rest of your guitar's wiring through a little buffer circuit, so it doesn't affect the tone of your pickup, other than subtracting out any noise it senses.
 
Awesome. Now i get it. Thank you again. If it weren’t for you and Dr Kev I would have left my soldering iron in the box and not frankensteined these perfectly fine as-is guitars 😂
 
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