Help! Wiring Colours on a Pre-Ceramic-era Stingray 5 Alnico Pickup

[Willplaysbass]

Hi,

Been a SR5 owner for a decade but this is my first post!

I recently got hold of a Musicman Alnico Stingray 5 pickup. After having some trouble figuring out various schematics the guys at Musicman customer service were able to confirm that it was in fact a pre 1991 SR 5 pickup without the dummy coil. My bass is 2004 SR5 with a Ceramic pickup and I know that putting this Alnico pickup will mean I lose the noise cancelling of the single coil and also the balancing of gains between the three different coil options on the 3-way switch. I have seen people wire dual coil pickups from other manufacturers without too much bother.

My biggest problem now is that the 4 wires on the Alnico pickup are totally different to the later pickups. The wire colours are blue, yellow, black and white. Does anyone know how these colours correlate to the wires on the more modern pickups?

I would love to hear from anyone who has any knowledge on the pickup or has experience wiring one into a more modern SR5 preamp. The guys at Musicmsn say they don't really have any info or wiring notes for this pickup so any help/light that can be shed on the pickup would be gratefully appreciated!

Thanks

Will

 

[MrMusashi]

as i see it the pickup with the noise cancelling microphone is wired similar to a normal pickup. that means 4 wires, 2 for each coil

this should, in theory, mean that you can figure out which wires belongs to which coil by using a multimeter and measure resistance.
when you get a value those wires belong to one coil.

to figure out which coil and how the polarity is you would need to look on the connections on the pickup itself. this would involve removing the plastic cover

some pickups have markings for polarity making it easy to figure out. usually at the point where the pickupwire is soldered onto the pickup itself. i havent opened any eb pickups so i cannot say how its done on those

when attaching the wires to the pcb you would still retain the gain balance since you are just replacing the 4 wires from the old pickup with the 4 wires from the new pickup.
how well it would function though is hard to say, given we dont know the difference in output from the pickups

if you are unsure the best thing to do is ask on the forums for a good luthier recommendation in your area.
make sure you specifically ask for electronics work and not just frets or paint jobs

hth

MrM