Custom Wound switching pickup for Stringmaster tone?

[Dennis Detweiler]

One of the young local steel players in my area is wanting to get a 50's Stringmaster tone, but be able to switch back and forth to his stock pickup tone on his Mullen U-12. Has this been done with a custom wound humbucker that swtiches to single coil? The pickup may likely need to use Alnico magnets? He also may need to add a tone control with Stringmaster specs? Wire guage and number of windings on the single coil side would maybe have to be duplicated? Any input appreciated. I'm guessing Bill Lawrence may have done this in the past, but he's gone and likely didn't document it?

[Bob Carlucci]

Yes, I have had that on my pedal steel guitars for about 46 years.. You need a 4 wire humbucker of any brand you like, and using a 3 way DPDT on-on-on switch, you can use the full humbucker, or either single coil on the pickup by itself, and believe me, there is a big difference in the sound of each.. Any pickup builder can make one up for you, and tell you how to wire the switch.. I have the setup on an old Marlen right now, and its wonderful.. Any humbucker you can get that fits the guitar can be modified by a good pickup builder to be set up as I have said, even if its only 2 wire right now,, and its usually very reasonable, cheaper than a new pickup most times... If you want to keep a single coil, you can get it modified to give you 2 sounds,, Say a 14K ohms with a tap at 9 K ohms, again 2 very different sounds... Its a setup thats available to ANY steel guitarist, its cheap, its very useful,and very very few steel players use it which has always baffled me,,, bob

[Stephen Cowell]

Stringmasters are humbucker guitars, believe it or not... most folks don't use the blend to defeat that in my experience. The unusual sound comes from having the coils 3" (or whatever) apart... you get some treble cancellation and a 'thickness'. The blend control really sounds bad to me, especially since it shunts the neck pickup and you're left with pure bridge, very thin sounding.

As Bob noted split-coil HB's have been around for a long time, if you have a 4-wire pickup it's as easy as adding a switch. I don't believe dropping one coil will give the classic SM tone however.

I do like adding a blend control to my Strats... put it on either the neck or bridge, then you can get the sound of neck + bridge (very Tele-like) or all 3 (alien?) with a 5-way switch.