PRS SE Custom 24 pickup electronics help needed

[inEden]

Hi,

I recently bought a PRS SE Custom 24 which I love. I haven't been playing long (3 years) so I'm don't really understand the electronics that well.

As I understand it, the pickups on the SE cu24 are coil tapped, which is rarer. If I was to replace the pickups with a 4 wire humbucker, that would be coil splitting right?

I read that coil tapped pickups needs to be modified or have that feature built in whereas any 4 wire humbucker are generally coil split and can be coil split. So if I got like a PAF humbucker set from SD or Lindy with 4 wires, it'll be coil splitting?

As for the wiring, if I got a 4 wire humbucker to replace the stock pickups, is the wiring the same as coil tapped? Can I just take a picture of the stock wiring and wire the new pickups exactly the same?

Thanks so much for the help. Really doing my head in trying to understand all the wiring. I looked at wiring diagrams for hours last night but can't make sense of it.

 

[dkilpatrick]

There's always confusion regarding coil tapped vs coil split. Sometimes they are listed separately but mean the same thing. Any 4 conductor humbucker will work in your SE CU 24 and can be wired as such. make sure you use the wiring diagram for that humbucker's manufacturer. Different brands use different color wires and the colors might not match up if you're looking at the wrong diagram. I am guilty of this, I once wired up a set of pickups that were always split no matter what the switches were doing. I couldn't figure out why because it matched the diagram exactly. I finally figured out it was the wrong diagram and the wire colors were reversed.

 

[AP515]

First look to see if the pups in the SE are 4 wire now. If you bought used, the guitar may be older, and the pups may be 2 wire. If they are 4 wire, and therefore splittable, any 4 wire pup will do the same thing. SD has wiring diagrams that will give you the right color wires to solder in the right places.

 

[inEden]

I have the PRS SE Custom 24 Trampas Green 2016 brand new with the 3 way blade switch.

I opened the back to have a look and it doesn't look like any wiring diagrams from seymour duncan. PRS doesn't have wiring diagrams for the SE Cu24 either.

I'll keep looking on other pickup manufacturers website. Hopefully something turns up.

 

[inEden]

Awesome I found a wiring digram on the dimazio website

(http://www.dimarzio.com/sites/default/files/diagrams/1h1dp1631v1ppsplittone_3w_all.pdf)

which uses the tele 3 way blade. I made sense of it cos the tele 3 way blade has 2 rows whereas the PRS has 1 row. So I followed the wires and all that so I made sense of how the pickups are wired to the 3 way blade and volume and understand better the whys of it.

Now I just gotta try make sense of the tone control with the gazillion wires going into it.

 

[AP515]

The tone control is a push pull that does the split. If you pull up on the tone knob you will get the single coil sounds.

 

[TFC]

As a "solder by numbers" guy myself, I can offer some help. When I replace pickups, which I've done many, many times, the first thing I do is draw on a piece of paper where each of the wires from the pickup is currently soldered. Below is a sample (it's a drawing of a 5-way switch):

I'm assuming that your current pickups are wired how you like. If that's the case, then to remove your current pickups all you need to do is note those soldering spots for each pickup and de-solder them. Then wire the new pickups to the same exact spots. The important thing here is that there's no need to check out other wiring diagrams or rewire anything other than the pickups themselves.

A couple of hints as to which wires are which for your current pickups: The coil split wires are usually red and white in PRS pickups. If there's a bare wire or metal sheath that's soldered to the back of a pot, that's a ground wire. You should be able to find the same info about your replacement pickups on the manufacturers website.

Obviously, I'm no expert when it comes to understanding how wiring works. However, I know enough to have been able to swap tons of pickups. And with only a few possible places a wire can be soldered, it's not difficult to deduce the correct wiring. Worst case, you have to swap the placement of two wires. No big deal. Hope this helps.

 

[TFC]

If you tell us where each wire from each pickup is wired in your CU24, and also which pickups you want to replace them with, I'm sure we could tell you which color wires go where.