MODS FOR ROCKERS
The patented Fender DoubleTap humbucker is a little different to a regular humbucker, for example, with a standard coil-split, which effectively just dumps one coil, or most of it, to ground. Firstly, the DoubleTap has mismatched coils: the screw coil is wound to a measured DCR of 5.17kohms and that’s the coil that’s voiced in the split mode. The slug coil measures 3.88k. However, that screw coil is tapped at a measured DCR of 3.92k (very close to the slug coil), and in humbucker mode it’s that portion of the screw coil that is linked in series to the slug coil. Why? Well, there’s less difference in output between the two modes reflected in the DCRs of the full humbucker (7.75k) and its single coil (5.17k), which is pretty close to the DCRs on the middle single coil (6.10k) and the neck which measures 5.83kohms [pic right, top].
“We really like the V-Mod pickups,” says Justin Norvell,“so the V-Mod IIs are just a varying of the recipe – winds, wire, bobbins, stagger – just to the point that we felt we’d enhanced them a little bit. There’s a pickup engineer we have, Steven Casado, who’s been in the pickup business for a long time, and he took Tim Shaw’s original designs and created a slightly different take.”
The original V-Mod pickups used a mixed magnet concept that’s retained on these MkII versions [pic right, bottom]. So, the Strat’s neck pickup uses Alnico II on the bass side and III on the treble; the middle pickup uses the same bass-side magnets with Alnico V on the treble and the bridge single coil of the standard Strat uses Alnico V for all six magnets. The Tele swaps it around so the bass-side magnets are Alnico V and treble side are II.
The Tele is hum-cancelling, too, in both mixed positions (parallel and series). The Strat’s single-coil mixes are humcancelling and of course so too is the bridge DoubleTap when it’s in humbucking mode.