What is different about the three coils? Any idea what i'd see if I deceided to hack one apart?
They're all the same coil, just more or less of it. Look at one of the coils in the Triumph diagram (
Triumph schematic from GibsonBass.com). See how the blue, green and red wires are 'tapped' into the coil at different lengths. Simplified, it would look like this (where "---" is the coil straightened out, like Egon's slinky):
|-----------------------------------|------------------|----------------|
Orange...........................Green..............Blue.................Red
Blue was designed to be normal response (most akin to normal HiZ pups in sound). From there it becomes obvious that Green is underwound (sounds like the pups on a cheap Japanese EB3 copy... but better... maybe an SB300 is a better comparison :wink: ) and Red is overwound (hot, comparitavely speaking, like Gibson dirty fingers geetar pups compared to a normal humbucker - more bassy with some treble roll off... but not that much rolloff because this is LoZ after all).
Jules, the tone switch is not dialing in different combinations, just one tap at a time, although it is a stacked pickup with two (probably) identical coils with taps (just like an output transformer in an amp for different speaker loads) making it a humbucker like the P100 guitar pup. That's why you have eight leads coming out. One lead is for the ground and then three hot taps from one coil, one lead is hot along with three taps from the second coil. The switch is used to connect the very same tap from each coil together making them run in series. Basically what you'd probably find inside is one blade magnet with two coils on top of each other. Theoreticly speaking there's a possibility to use only one coil of each tap though the output would be even lower and probably not very much low end producing. As if there arent enough switches already on that control plate.....
Is there an echo in here?
... and no, I could use a few more switches on there, definately.
I've checked - the LoZ LP pups do indeed have blade a blade pole piece (which means that they could be used on a bass with more/less than 4 strings or with differant string spacing.... or even a guitar, if you felt like it - the LoZ LP guitar pup does not have the same tapping to it, just the 'normal' setting - they're also much smaller, so that's how you can tell them apart: smaller with 2 wires not 8 ).
The 2 stacked coils in the pup are identical (they have to be in order to work as a humbucker) - just reverse wound with reversed polarity - mirror images of each other.
As Doom said, the tone switch just connects the like coils for both pups (blue to blue, red to red etc). It is a double blade switch (like 2 tele switches connected to the same lever) and is no longer available (Rob and I have both scoured the net looking - if anyone finds one, new or the original part, please, for heavan's sake, let me know). For a single-pup bass, a tele switch works just fine.
It is not recomended to connect 2 differant coil taps (e.g. green to red) - this will affect the humbucking performance of the pup, and since unbalanced LoZ signals are very suseptable to hum/noise I strongly advise against it. Same goes for coil tapping/single coil mode. If one really wants the single coil sound out of these you can add a series/parallel swicth (parallel coils sound very similar to a single coil of the same type, but with humbucking behaviour intact) OR enable the coil tap only when both pups are on (using the top coil of one pup, and the bottom of the other, so that one pup bucks the other) just like on a Sonex Custom/Standard guitar.
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Scan of 1970 Epiphone guitar catalogue produced by Rosetti for the UK market. Undated but most likely from mid-late 1970, this was the first UK catalogue to show the new range of Japanese (Matsumoku) Epiphone guitars. Interestingly, these pages show the Epiphone solid bodies with a single-sided Fender-style headstock layout - a feature quickly replaced with a typical two-sided Epiphone headstock almost immediately. Epiphone electric guitars: 9520, 9525; bass guitars: 9521, 9526; acoustic guitars: 6730, 6830, 6834
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