Help! New pickups in JS100 Sound bad? - PAF pro and Fred sou

[Voodoosoup]

Hello everyone,

I hope someone can help.
I recently took my JS100 into my favorite local music store to have them replace the stock pickups with the PAF pro and the Fred. I went and picked the guitar up today when I brought it home and plugged it in I was very dissapointed.
The PAF sounds pretty fat and warm but the Fred in the bridge sounds very thin and trebly at least half the bass and mids compared to the PAF. Then I hit the coiltap, and I get the exact opposite. The Fred is warmer and the PAF hardly has any output at all and both pickups with the coil tap engaged are less than half the volume of what they are with the coiltap off. Anyone with a similar setup that could tell me how their pickups are wired. The green and bare wires are soldered to ground. The black and white wires of each *go to opposite sides of the 3-way switch and the red wires go to the tone control/coiltap soldered to the contacts closest to the top of the guitar.

Also the spacing of the poles on the pickups
the especially the Fred is way off. Do I need a pickup with different pole spacing?

Thanks in advance

Voodoosoup
phildc@home.com

(Edited by Voodoosoup at 4:50 pm on Mar. 23, 2001)

[chromeboy]

Hi there,

Thanks for your post. I have been contemplating replacing the stock JS100 pick-ups with PAF Fred and Pro, what has been stopping me from doing this was the notion that I would put in Evolutions.....now I know that I will go with the Evolutions. My JS10 doesn't sound nearly as good as my JEM10....I'm better off sticking with the evolutions!

Good luck with your JS.

[Scott 74]

Chromeboy if you put a Evolution in let me know how it sounds. I've been thinking of replacing my JS100 pickups as well.

Voodoo good luck and let me know if you get your problem straightened out? Oh also I don't think the spacing of your pole pieces is going to make much a difference but better to ask Rich. Later...........

[Rich]

The poles on a stock JS are just 'slightly' off dead center of the strings. They might have installed non-F-spaced pups. The Fred is a very trebbly p/u to begin with. Iain put Evos in his 1000 and is very happy with them, when I have time I can't wait for him to bring it over so I can hear them. As for the wiring, wrong guy. When I have to do wiring I make a drawing of where everything went and it just goes back in the same spot. I have an electronice degree, but fail at it miserably in real life!

[Josh Blagg]

Do you have the wiring diagrams for your pickups? *I can't remember exactly which wires on which on DiMarzio but it might be something you want to check into...the wiring diagrams with each pickup give the exact schematic for how to wire it correctly as a coil tappable hb.

[Voodoosoup]

Thanks for all the suggestions, I took it back to the shop yesterday and told them it was definately not right and the guy that did the wiring agreed but said the owner had checked it out and said it was ok. Dimarzios wiring is different then what they did. I also looked at the wiring for the JS1000 but it was the older model with two PAF pros in it. The wiring is just like dimarzio suggests except for the fact that the neck pickup is installed rotated 180.

Rich, *On the newer JS1000's are the neck pickups still reversed? I wasn't able to view the wiring diagram for the newest one on Ibanez's site.

Anyways I think I'm going to take a print out of the JS1000 to them to show them exactly how it should be. Or just bring it home and do it myself!

Thanks

Phil

(Edited by Voodoosoup at 6:09 pm on Mar. 27, 2001)

[Voodoosoup]

The mystery is solved!!!

It turns out that the way they had it wired it was changing the phase of the pickups instead of doing the coil-tap thing.
They're going to re-wire it tomorrow going by the JS1000 wiring diagram I took them tonight, minus the hi-pass filter push pull on the volume.

Thanks to everyone for their suggestions.

Phil