Applying Humbucking (HB) Pairs Analysis to the Paul Reed Smith 513 Guitar
© 2016 Don Baker dba android originals LC, Tulsa OK
The Paul Reed Smith PRS-513 guitar, a beautiful, awesome-sounding guitar, boasts a 3-way and a 5-way switch to control two dual-coil humbuckers at the bridge and neck, with a single-coil pickup at the middle position, for a total of 5 coils Of the 15 choices, three of them are the middle single-coil pickup and thus the same, so it acknowledges that there are 13 different choices. Hence, if I understand correctly, the 513 designation, 5 coils with 13 different outputs. The 3 outputs with the middle coil alone are not humbucking.
This article will analyze what kind of HB pairs the same 5 coils could produce. Consider the neck humbucker as two coils NN (neck north up) and NS (neck south up). Suppose that the middle coil has a south pole up, which would make it MS. Consider the bridge humbucker as BN and BS. Because NN is so close to NS, and BN is so close to BS, some humbucking pair combinations will have little difference in tone from others. In the table below, the left-most column shows the supposed relative physical order of the single-coil poles in space, the middle columns show the in-phase HB pairs, with equivalent HB pair just to the right. The right columns show the contra-phase HB pairs, with any pairs with equivalent tones just to the right.
As humbucking pair theory predicts, there are 10 HB pairs, but because the close spacing of the coils at the neck and bridge, 2 of those pairs are essentially equivalent to 2 others, leaving 8 pairs with unique tonal outputs, which can be connected either in series or parallel, for a total of 16 HB pairs with unique tonal outputs out of 20.
Legal notice – The switching system for HB pairs is protected under U.S. patent pending 2016/0027422 A1, filed 7/23/2014, and an undisclosed U.S. Provisional Patent Application, filed 6/28/2016.