Wiring: What do the five wires do?

Wiring: What do the five wires do?

Nova pickups feature a five-wire system to support flexible, creative wiring without sacrificing ease of use.

Here’s what comes out of the pickup:

  • Ground wire –bare - Shields and chassis ground
  • Secondary Cold – blue - regularly wired to ground
  • Secondary Hot – yellow - Linked to Secondary Cold for series operation
  • Primary Cold –white - Linked to Primary Hot for series operation
  • Primary Hot – red - Hot lead

We typically pre-wire pickups so that:

  • Secondary Cold is grounded
  • Secondary Hot connects to Primary Cold - this is your series link
  • Primary Hot is your hot output

This makes the default configuration humbucking and intuitive for most builders.



To split the pickup you can take the yellow-white cable pair and wire it in one of two ways:

to ground: Enabling the Primary Coil Pair.
to hot: Enabling the Secondary Coil Pair.

These Coils are active in the Primary Split:

The Primary split enables the modern/reverse split coil, in which the bass strings are being picked up closer to the bridge and the treble strings closer to the neck, providing a balanced tone with enhanced clarity on the bass strings and some extra beef on the treble strings.

These Coils are active in the Secondary Split:

The Secondary split enables the classic split coil, in which the bass strings are being picked up closer to the neck and the treble strings closer to the bridge, highlighting the strings' inherent contrast in tone.

Want to explore more? You can:

  • Flip the phase of A or B individually by swapping the in and out leads,
  • Wire them in parallel for a less hot, more clear voicing

Yeah alright, but which pots?

In short, the lower the pot values and the lower the number of pots, the more top end you’ll lose.

(A 500k volume pot and a 500k tone pot are roughly equal to a 250k volume pot etc.)

I recommend 500k audio taper pots for volume and and 500k linear taper pots for tone control.
If you like really mellow, dark tones, try 250k. (...don’t…)
If you prefer that extra attack and bite, try 1M.

 

Need help choosing a layout? Contact us here and we’ll walk you through your options.

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