Back in the good ol’ days of the late 70s and early 80s, us keen modders were beginning to get the aftermarket parts our guitar-fantasies needed, not least pickups. Up to that point, unless you wanted to modify a humbucker yourself, you were stuck with one sound: you’d wire the ‘hot’ output to your volume pot or switch, and wire the earth to the back of a pot. All good.
I don’t think Larry DiMarzio was the first person to offer up a different route, but in terms of experience he certainly was, with the four-conductor hook-up cable. As each of the humbucker’s two coils has a start and finish wire (two coils, four conductors) it meant that, usefully, you could wire a humbucker’s two coils in different ways: standard series, voice either single coil by dumping the unwanted coil to ground, or wire the two coils in parallel, retaining the hum-cancelling nature (unlike the single coil option) but giving a slightly lower-output, more single-coil-type of sound. Armed with a mini-toggle switch or two, we now
