By Ed Malaker
Posted 12/21/2019
The Seymour Duncan SH-2N Jazz is a humbucker pickup with a clean and articulate tone that’s perfect for fast runs. Used as a neck pickup, it’s an excellent match for many of the brand’s bridge pickups. For this wiring installation, we’ll use four different colored conductor wires and a bare wire.
The Wires
As a humbucker, the SH-2N Jazz has two electromagnetic coils as part of its construction. Each coil has a positive and negative wire. The first coil uses a Black wire as the Positive and a White wire as the negative. The second coil uses a Red wire as the Positive and a Green wire as the Negative. The colors that go to each coil varies between manufacturers, but there are simple tests that you can do to find out which wire is going to which coil. The Bare wire is the Shield. Its primary purpose is to trap radio frequencies and shuttle them to ground before they degrade your tone. The Shield and the coils are not directly connected (Fig 1).
Fig 1
The “Standard” way to wire humbuckers is to set them in Series. Series means that we run one coil right into the other, which creates one long continuous path for our signal to travel. Combining the two increases the output gain of the pickup considerably, and it is also responsible for its warmer tones because of the phase cancellation that’s caused by the close positioning of the two coils.
Getting Started
To install the SH-2 Jazz, we begin by considering the Black Wire to be the primary Hot Wire. We solder the same coils Negative White and the next coils Positive Red together and tape them off. Finally, we use Green as the primary Ground Wire. It’s standard practice to solder the Green and Bare wires together (Fig 2).
Fig 2
Now we are left with the positive (Black) and negative (Green) wires that we will need to install our pickup. Solder the Green and Bare wires to the back of the Volume Pot (Fig 3).
Fig 3
Next, solder the Black Wire to the first tab on the Volume control. Solder the third tab to the back of the Volume pot, with a short wire or by physically bending the tab and soldering it in place (Fig 4).
Fig 4
Next, connect one wire from the center tab of the Volume pot to the Output jack, and one from the Output jack to the back of the Volume control (Fig 5).
Fig 5
Project complete!
Summary
This is the most common way to wire a humbucker pickup. Adding a Tone Control will only add more components that get soldered to the Volume control, but the circuit will not change.
If you have more than one pickup, all of the positive wires will go to the switch. The switch will select which pickup signal will get sent to the Volume control, and from then on the circuit will be the same as presented here.
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