Wiring, resistance, & pole pieces

[Steve Aldridge]

Hi prs lovers, does anyone have a wiring diagram for a Zack Myres and or 245? Also does anyone know the resistance of the 245s pickups. Finally what does adjusting pole pieces do. Thanks

 

[SinSir]

PRS is notoriously bad about releasing specs of pickups. On a chart found here the 245 specs are

Treble 9.6
Bass 8.96

Actual readings from owners I found

Neck pickup is 7.91 ohms
Bridge pickup is 10.58 ohms

SE 245s where neck - 7.94, bridge 11.35

A multimeter will help you find out for sure. Adjusting pole pieces is like adjusting the height of a pickup but instead for each individual string.

 

[Steve Aldridge]

Yes thanks for the information.and your time

 

[alex1fly]

Polepiece height also affects tone. Lower the polepieces and you get a darker tone. Raise them and the tone is brighter.

 

[Steve Aldridge]

Thanks Alex that's just the info I was looking for

 

[Steve Aldridge]

PRS is notoriously bad about releasing specs of pickups. On a chart found here the 245 specs are

Treble 9.6
Bass 8.96

Actual readings from owners I found

Neck pickup is 7.91 ohms
Bridge pickup is 10.58 ohms

SE 245s where neck - 7.94, bridge 11.35

A multimeter will help you find out for sure. Adjusting pole pieces is like adjusting the height of a pickup but instead for each individual string.

 

[Steve Aldridge]

Just tried the meter neck 7.64. Bridge 10.21. Don’t have a calibrated meter. I could measure the 500k pot for a reference but our figures are in the right ball park.

 

[MattGuitarRoberts]

The SE 245S set in my Zach Meyers always tended to make the neck pickup output much stronger than the bridge, even though the bridge is said to have considerably more winds. FYI the general reason for this is that strings move a much greater distance back and forth at the neck and far smaller movement at the bridge. To even them up I had to sink the neck pickup way down below the mounting ring and the bridge up pretty high. My pickups have the 4 wires plus ground (I believe it’s red and green start and end of the North coil and black and white start and end of the South coil). They are traditionally wires series with the green and white wires bridged, so the red is HOT and the black goes to ground (the black wire is actually bound to the ground wire with an extra layer of insulation so it looks like one wire but since they terminate at the same place it makes sense to have them together). I found that I wanted a brighter less heavy sound out of the neck pickup anyway so I wired it in parallel by taking the red and white wires to the volume pot and the green to ground. This worked great as the reduction in output balanced the volume of the two pickups better, and brighter sound good for blues and classic rock lower gain. The only problem now is that wiring a Humbucker in parallel lowers its overall DC resistance to about a quarter of the series wiring so we’re talking 2 ohms (don’t mistake this for a reflection of output level, the volume only goes down about 20%, output is about much more than DC resistance). So when the pickup switch is in middle position, since the neck pickup is the path of least resistance the sound is dominated by the neck pickup tone with very little bridge tone coming through. If I wind the neck volume pot back to 8.5 ish all of a sudden the bridge pickup tone comes in. I could just find that sweet spot every time I play and use it successfully, but that’s pretty touchy and I’m looking into installing a resistor somewhere to achieve the same result, maybe even having the switch combine the two pickups is series rather than parallel that could also work.
I’ll keep experimenting with this for a bit, but I think in the end I’ll be putting in a set of covered low output PAF style pickups for a vintage LP tone. I’m not a high gain guy and I like to be able to swap from a Strat or Tele to a Humbucker guitar without there being a big difference in gain structure.

 

[Wannabegreat]

Jumping in here with a similar question...
I've found a difference in pickup resistance between my '05 ST24 and '06 CU24 and I'm wondering if the pups in the cu are not what they should be. Both are 20th anniversary.
The st sounds brighter than the cu but way more so than I expected.
The st is correct with the HFS 15k at and VB at 8.56k. The cu is 14.65k and 8k. That's a major difference in winding count.
Is this just due to the year of manufacture or does the cu have different pups?

Thanks for any input!