Phase, and a sweet Warmoth Strat

Alright, back again! For this week’s project, there’s enough material to cover for an entire book, but fortunately for you, I’m just going to talk about ‘phase.’ I have the perfect candidate here in a custom Warmoth Strat. Marvel at this glorious flame-maple-top-over-chambered-alder-with-birdseye-maple-neck-and-rosewood-fingerboard. I know, it’s a lot to take in, and don’t even get me started on the hardware. Tonally, this thing is about as perfectly built as a Strat can be, and it’s easily one of the best I’ve played in a long while, so let’s get into it!

When I first met this beauty, the 2nd position on the 5-way switch was sounding really thin, and since the owner had ordered and installed the pickups himself, I had my suspicion that a common mistake had been made.

If you don’t know how a 5-way Strat switch works, it’s really simple. Position 1 selects just the bridge pickup, 2 selects bridge and middle, 3 selects just the middle, 4 middle and neck, and 5 just the neck. Pretty straightforward. It even corresponds visually when you’re holding the thing in your hands. If the switch is all the way to the right, the pickup all the way to the right is on. Cool!

So, position 2 was thin, but 1 and 3 sounded just fine. More simply, both pickups sounded great on their own, but when they were both on, they weren’t getting along well. This ruled out nearly every possible issue except just one: phase.

What’s phase? I’m so glad you asked!

Phase is a term we use in guitar world to describe the interaction of two pickups with regard to the direction of the signal they produce. Two pickups are said to be “in phase” when the signal that they are generating is going in the same direction, and they are “out of phase” when they are opposing one another. One of the easiest ways to understand phase is to look at a graph of the waveforms, so let’s take a look at some sine waves and see if we can make some sense out of them! Oh Boy!

In the example above, both sine waves are perfectly out of phase. That means that when they are added together, they will cancel each other out. Also, notice that wave one is the mirror image of wave two, so wave two is the result of reversing the phase of wave one. This is exactly what was going on with these pickups! They were wired out of phase, that is, one of them was wired backwards and was opposing the other.

But why do two pickups that are out of phase still make sound at all?

Good question! It’s because they aren’t perfectly out of phase like in the example. Because of their physical location, winding, magnet strength, past resentment, spirit animal, amount of blood and spit on them, etc., each pickup is generating a slightly different signal, so they cancel wherever they are opposing, leaving behind a brittle remnant signal. You can hear the difference for yourself when you switch between pickups. The fact that they sound different is the whole reason we use multiple pickups! Oh yeah!

The cool thing about phase in guitar is that it’s really easy to reverse. Since all pickups have an in and an out–signal and ground–all you have to do is reverse them, and the phase reverses too. If out becomes in, the direction of the signal reverses too!

I already mentioned that this guitar’s owner had installed the electronics himself. In fact, he used an Obsidian Wire solderless harness, which was really cool, and beautifully constructed, but he wanted the wiring done professionally with real live solder. I, of course, was happy to oblige. Wiring is my wheelhouse!

So as you plainly can see (kidding), I just used three 500k pots, a .022uF Orange Drop cap, and a standard 5-way switch. The pickups are all technically humbuckers (two-coil pickups)–if you look closely, you can see the dead giveaway black and white middle leads where the two coils meet on the two “single coil” shaped pups–hence the decision to use 500k instead of 250k pots to retain those precious high frequencies. Also, dad had a complaint that the pickups weren’t as bright as he would have liked, adding to my case for 500k pots.

Here are the leads to the bridge humbucker, a Suhr Thornbucker. From a quick Google search of “pickup wiring codes,” I was able to determine that red and white were the middle leads, and since I had no plans to install a coil split or series/parallel switching, I knew I could solder those together, insulate them, and tuck them safely away. So that left me with green and black for signal and ground, in and out. Now I just had to determine which way was in phase and which was out. 50/50 odds! If you’re wondering about that 5th bare wire, that’s the chassis ground for the pickup, and it’ll get twisted together with the green or black wire, whichever one I decide to ground. First, I went with green since the other two pickups had green ground wires, leaving black as my signal, I love consistency in color codes!

if you look closely, you can see that I guessed wrong, so I just switched the wires! I grounded black, and used green as signal. Simple enough! Here are some glamour shots to finish up:

And that’s it for this week! Let me know if there’s something else you want to know about in the comments, otherwise next week I’ll be writing about some of the wiring tips and tricks I used in this project.

Thanks again for reading! See you next week.