Swaping Pickups

Hello and thank you for watching Guitar Tech. Today we're going to swap pickups on a Schecter C1 Plus. The first thing you need to do is remove the back plate and as you can see we've already done that and if you've never looked inside your guitar before one thing you want to do is make sure you know what you're doing before you get started. So you want to try to get the wires untangled as much as you can by gently pulling them out identifying which cables are to your pickups which are usually the fatter gray or black cables with several wires. They could have two wires, three wires, four wires, five wires coming out of them depending on the manufacturer. So here what I have I have found the wire going to the neck pickup coming through the cavity here and I need to identify where it's going. So first thing we have a hot wire the green wire is the code on this pickup these are Duncan Design by the way that comes stock in the Schecter and it's soldered down here to this first lug of the pot the volume control and we follow it and then we have the looks like a ground cable looks like both pickups are soldered together here pull this other wire out for the other pickup and you'll see that they've joined the two ground wires from both pickups and soldered them to the ground on the top of the switch here you'll notice both pickups have sets of green wires so this green wire from the bridge pickup is also going to its pot down here as you can see connecting right here on the volume pot for the bridge pickup this of course is a switch mounted on the back of a tone control which is doing split coil on this model now not all the guitars out there have split coil options but this is one way of handling it is buying a pot with a switch attached to it you wire your pickups according to the wiring diagram from the manufacturer to the switch for this set they've wired the red and white of each pickup are actually twisted together and soldered to the middle lug of the switch so basically there's three connections on each pickup that need to be dealt with and then once that's done we can remove the pickups there we go nice and clean see one thing too is you want to make sure that you don't touch the tip to other solder joints that you can weaken them and wind up with cold joints so you want to make sure everything's out of your way when you're working in here so now i'll get in here and undo the green wire there's one reach in here and get the other wire voila i usually just put a little twist in these wires like this so that when i pull them through the cavity of the guitar they don't snag on things now when i go to put them back into maybe another guitar later what i would do is put tape around the ends here because these are pretty sharp they can grab into the wood when you're shoving it through a skinny little hole so if you put tape on them makes it a lot easier to thread the guitar so and there you have it two loose ready to remove pickups here we flip the guitar over what you gotta do to remove is loosen your strings first because as you can see the strings aren't going to give us room to get this big pickup out of there so we're going to loosen these four screws on the outside and so you can just remove the screws just pull it straight up you'll notice the screws are pretty long there so again you want to use caution when you pull this out so you don't scratch your finish that's another reason why you need a lot of string booster playing the strings and just slip that guy right out of there onto the next pickup okay now that we have the parts for the pickup we need to put the pickup together we need to add the ring to the pickup you need to pay attention to the orientation of the side of the ring there's a skinny side and a fat side and the bridge pickup has a thicker ring but it still has a slope to it so make sure you get the pickup in the right orientation when you install it in the ring now looking at the wiring schematic given by the company i'll remind as i remind you this is the same company for the pickups that i pulled out of the guitar as the ones that i'm putting in okay but the pickups i'm putting in have five wires and the ones i pulled out have four wires and if you remember earlier in the video the green wire which in this case was connected with the bare wire to ground was connected where the black wire on this set go so what do i do do i follow the directions and the color codes here or do i follow the color codes as i remember them and wrote them down when i pulled the old pickups out of the guitar i'm going to trust the manufacturer knows what they're talking about and i'm going to go with the black wire as the hot lead because this does have a different wiring setup on this pickup so sometimes the ones you put in will match the set that you came out with and other times it will not but always follow the manual okay a note about tinning once you get your wires set up if you just have a little bit of solder on your tip of your gun you can just roll the tip around on your string on your string on the wire and tin it so you just get a little coating of solder on there okay i'm getting ready to attach the bare wire and the green wire to the negative to the ground post on the top of the switch here and you'll notice that i'm doing this with needle nose pliers these wires are small and they get hot really quick and you can burn yourself very bad so it doesn't feel good so always use needle nose when it comes to handling the wires and plus it gives you a little bit more accuracy and control over where the wire is going and so we'll just get started here and putting these on the top hold it in place for a second only takes just a slight touch with the with a good hot iron to accomplish this task you don't have to sit on it very long and if you do you can overheat and that's not good because then you're making yourself work harder so now i just have one more connection for the bridge pickup and the two white wires are going to solder on the outside lug the middle outside lug on switch here well after a few minutes of soldering here is the completed install just uh make sure you tuck the wires away to where they won't pull on each other and you shouldn't have any problems and here is a shot of the completed install as you can see i did swap out the black pickup rings for the cream ones i usually like this look thanks for watching