Custom versus Custom

What’s the difference between the humbucker/single coil switches on the two Customs?

The current Custom uses a five-way lever switch with the following ‘preset’ sounds: bridge humbucker; bridge humbucker with neck single coil; both humbuckers; neck single coil with bridge single coil; neck humbucker. All coil/pickup mixes are in parallel, as they are on the other configurations.

The 24-08 swaps the five-way to a three-way lever pickup selector switch plus two mini-toggle humbucking/ single coil ‘mode’ switches, one for each pickup. This means we can also access just the bridge single coil (slug coil), the neck single coil (slug coil) and the neck humbucker with the bridge single coil.

Aside from the sound differences, the way the single coil voices are created differs too. The Custom 24 simply splits the humbuckers, voicing the slug coil – the inner coils of each humbucker. The 24-08, with its 85/15 MT (multi-tap) pickups, is rather different.

“The way it works is that we’ve put extra turns on one of the coils so that when you hit the switch [into single coil mode] you get one coil but with those extra turns. It’s a realistic [single coil] sound,” states Paul Reed Smith.

So in humbucking mode that over-wound slug coil is tapped to match the winds on the screw coil. When we go to single coil, the slug coil is voiced but that previously unused portion of the coil is added, in series, to beef up the approximately 4k ohms reading of the slug coil (neck pickup) on its own to around 5.9k ohms when the tapped portion of the coil is added. Additionally, the neck pickup is reversed (which doesn’t affect the phase) so the slug coil sits closest to the neck – “we put it there because it’s more a single coil position,” says Paul – which not only offers maximum bass response but also widens the gap between the two slug coils and has a subtle effect on the single coil mix.