What is a coil tap switch?

Riaan

Been seeing this being mentioned on some guitars - so what is a coil tap switch and what does it do?

MiKeZilLA

I'm no techie clearly.... but it's essentially just a switch that allows one of the coils in a humbucker to operate on it's own giving you nice bright strat like single coil sound.....

AlanRatcliffe

A coil-tap is an extra wire from a single-coil pickup which lets you short out part of the coil to turn a hot single-coil into a lower powered one. Pioneered by Schecter in the '80s, it's rarely found these days and often what is called a coil-tap switch is actually a coil-cut for a humbucker.

A coil-cutswitch shorts out one coil of a humbucker to effectively turn it into a single-coil pickup. Note that many humbuckers give a very unconvincing single-coil sound when coil-cut, although some are designed specifically to cut well (Fralin's Unbucker) and higher powered 'buckers tend to give more usable sounds when cut.

Riaan-Combrink

Alan Ratcliffe wrote it's rarely found these days and often what is called a coil-tap switch is actually a coil-cut for a humbucker.

Alan,
I never understood this spec on my Cort X6.
Look at the pickup switching data as published by Cort.

Coil Tap Push Down
Position1 : Neck
Position2 : Neck & Middle
Position3 : Middle
Position4 : Middle & Bridge
Position5 : Bridge
Coil Tap Pull Up
Position1 : Rear Coil of Neck
Position2 : Rear Coil of Neck & Middle
Position3 : Middle
Position4 : Middle & Front Coil of Bridge
Position5 : Front Coil of Bridge

http://www.cort.co.kr/english/products/common/view.asp?product_id=131

Are these esentially coil-cuts (per your explanation) to make up additional pickup combos?

AlanRatcliffe

Think of it this way: All that's happening is when you pull the push/pull pot up, it turns off one coil of each humbucker. This gives you a Strat type 3 single-coil setup with the 5-way behaves exactly as it does on a Strat.

With the pot pushed down, it is exactly the same selections on the 5-way, just with the bridge and neck pickups as full humbuckers.

To get this fixed in your mind, the best thing you can do is plug in and play around with the settings while tapping the polepieces of the pickups with a screwdriver tip to see which coils are working with each setting - it'll make sense very quickly if you do that.