June Mod Of The Month – The Gradual Tap

For June, we’re doing a nice and easy way to get a plethora of tones out of your humbucker. This month, we’re talking about the Gradual Tap* Mod. This mod utilizes a Humbucker with a 3-conductor lead that sounds great tapped. Examples of our humbuckers would be our Unbucker, our Standard Humbucker, or our High Output Humbucker. It also utilizes our Blender Pot.

*Alright…we know that “tapping” is different than “splitting”. Technically we’re “splitting” the coil here. But, we’re gonna call it “tap” anyway.


The Mod:

Fralin H-S-S Gradual Tap

Normally, when you’re Splitting a coil, you’re taking one of the coils and sending them to ground to cancel out the signal. You can achieve this with a Push-Pull Pot, or a regular SPST / DPDT switch. However, what if you want to gradually split it? Our friendly friend the Blender Pot is here to help. Basically, the Blender Pot is acting like a volume knob for the coil you want to Split. Here’s how you wire it up to a Strat with an H-S-S configuration:

How it works:

The Humbucker above has a 3-Conductor Lead. The White is going to the switch, the Black and Shield are going to Ground, and the Red is going to the Blender. The other lug of the Blender is going to ground (Attached to the Master Tone Casing – you can run it to the Blender’s casing if you have metal shielding grounding all electronics on the back of the pickguard).

When you roll the blender, the resistive barrier between the Red (Tap) is decreased, and more of the signal is sent to ground. Check out how Blender Pots work in our article about Pots here.

We hope you like it! Next month will be more gradual tap and blender madness. Stay tuned!

Written By:

Tyler Delsack

👋 I'm Tyler Delsack, the Manager of Fralin Pickups. I've been a guitarist for 26 years, and along with managing the shop and working on this Website, I love tinkering with things!

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