Valentine coil tap, no difference in sound. Strange thing.

[emmethayes]

Hi everyone. I just bought an MM Valentine (s/n G79482) from ebay. My 9th Musicman, and one hell of a great guitar.
However, I noticed that when selecting the neck humbucker, its was louder in split mode than humbucker mode.

Checked the forums and found out about the PU COM pot. If I adjust the pot till the split and non-split volumes are the same, the pot is all the way off!.
Also the tone is identical, split or not. The marketing blurb says this guitar is a telecaster/335 cross.
I have checked the switches on the tone pot and they are switching correctly.

From this I am deducing the pickup is not splitting or there would be a change in tone and volume when split.

So, googled the problem to get a circuit/wiring diagram, no joy but did find review in Guitar.com that shows a picture of the circuit board and noticed something a bit strange.
Where the neck pickup connects to the PCB there are 5 connections. The board is marked G B W Gr R, and has the pickup wires going to it in this order, G B W R Gr. So the last 2 wires seem to be the wrong way round.
Looking at the picture from Guitar.com I can see the red wire is on the 5 contact, where as on my guitar its on the 4th.

I have seen other posts of people saying the split/Non-split tones are very similar, others saying they are very different and I am wondering if my guitar is mis-wired, along with a few others!!

Any chance some kind valentine owners could post pictures of their PCB so I can compare?
Anyone have a wiring or circuit diagram?

I have attached the 2 pictures.
In the pics, valentine1 is my guitar, valentineG is from guitar.com

thanks

 

[DrKev]

Hi Emmet! Welcome to the forum!

Yes, based on those photos, there does appear to be an issue, there is also an issue of if "GR" should be green or ground (they're different in the two photos). Let me flag this with Customer Service and we'll have a response in a day or two. If you are still under warranty, don't do anything for now and wait for the response.

 

[racerx]

Here are photos from my stock Val. I'm not an expert by any means but your first photo looks like re-flowed joints so I'm wondering if the prior owner swapped the pickups back and forth.

https://imgur.com/a/OZNogXs

 

[DrKev]

Looks like GR is green.

I have an email in with CS, hopefully we'll have a response Monday or Tuesday.

 

[emmethayes]

Wow! thanks so much.
I too am starting to think it has been tampered with. The bottom of the neck pickup just has 'N' stamped on it.
I will put the wires back in the order of racerx's post and see what happens.

many thanks .

 

[elvisdog]

For what it's worth, the split tones are noticeably different on my Valentine in neck-pickup-only mode but much less noticeable in the middle position. The split neck is a great sound -- hope you can get yours working!

 

[msquared]

People tend to get these and dislike the pickups for various reasons (I love them personally). It would not surprise me if yours has been modded. I agree with racerx that yours looks like it's had some work done.

The split coil should at least be noticeable even if the difference is subtle sometimes. I find that the signal chain beyond the guitar has a lot to do with how much of an effect it has.

 

[DrKev]

I have confirmation from CS, neck humbucker wires are connected as follows

shield -> G
Black -> B
White -> W
Green -> GR
Red -> R

 

[emmethayes]

thanks.
So, I rewired to the correct spec.
Doing the 'tap test' both before and after I can confirm the coil is now splitting correctly.
However, the tone is only VERY slightly different.
A bit disappointed but will continue to investigate to ensure there are no more faults.

Thanks for everyones help.

 

[mctang]

Found this post because I have the exact same problem. Coil split gives more volume output than the humbucker mode. Has anyone figured out the correct wiring? The last reply said the "corrected" wiring gave only a slight tone difference.

 

[mctang]

Nvm, contacted the customer service and learned the PU COM pot can adjust volume compensation. To be honest, even all the way back to zero compensation, the single coil mode neck pickup is quite loud compared to the humbucker mode. Now the neck position coil split works great. The middle position difference between the modes is quite tiny, though, hard to tell the difference.

 

[msquared]

I've found that with some signal chains it's impossible to tell whether the split is happening or not.

There are some frequencies which emphasized differently that don't always carry across.