In late 2011 I bought a stock Ibanez S420 guitar, which I’ve used for most of my musical projects since then. While I like the guitar I’ve always felt that I wasn’t happy with the stock pickups, the Ibanez INF1 and INF2. I can’t even articulate what it was I didn’t like about them. Maybe they were too boomy? Maybe they lacked definition? I don’t know, but I’d managed to convince myself I didn’t like them.
Fast forward to 2014, in order to deflect my increasing frustration with music I decided I would actually change the stock pickups out for something new. This led to the first problem: what to exchange them with?
There are, I believe, a hundred million companies that make guitar pickups. Most of the pickups are marketed based on what I’d consider nebulous terms. “Vintage output”, “sterile edginess”, “smooth mids”, “Useless numeric value of parameter.” I don’t want to read about how pickups sound, I want to hear how pickups sound. Guitar manufacturers sell guitars on their websites pretty much through images alone, like that means anything to a buyer. At least some pickup manufacturers have little videos or samples, but not much in the way of comparisons. You can listen to a video of some well-known guitarist playing pickups on their custom guitar, but no comparison with other pickups in that same guitar, or even details about what huge rack of effects and settings they’re using with those pickups. I also don’t live in an area that features a “hear what stuff sounds like” store, so I can’t just go try pickups out.
Ibanez Tmb100 Wiring
I eventually settled on what I figured was a safe bet: a Dimarzio Liquifire and Crunch Lab set, which are marketed as a set from Dimarzio based around John Petrucci from Dream Theater. I like John Petrucci’s work, even though I don’t sound like him, and can’t play like him. I didn’t have any misguided belief that new pickups would make me able to play better – they won’t.
I bought the “F” spacing pickups, which are slightly wider spacing on the pole pieces. I don’t know if it actually would have made the difference. Here’s what Dimarzio has to say about F-Spacing:
“For proper string alignment and balanced output, F-spaced humbuckers should be used in the bridge position on all guitars with string spacing at the bridge of 2.1″ (53 mm) or greater. On these guitars, if the nut width is 1-11/16” (43 mm) or greater, F-spaced pickups can be used in the neck position as well.”
Seymour Duncan Ibanez Az Wiring: Best Pickups For Ibanez Guitars Part Ii
On my S420 I measured the string width at the nut to be 36 mm. The width at the bridge was be 53 mm. The width at the neck pickup was 49 mm, and the spacing of the poles on the INF1 neck pickup was 51 mm. That’s right on the limit so probably either would have worked. I got F-spacing pickups for both the Liquifire and the Crunch Lab.
I’m not scared of soldering and electronics work, and I’m cheap, so I did the work myself. What annoyed me about the process is actually how little information exists on how the guitar is wired. The Dimarzio information included with the pickups is fine, but they didn’t have a specific wiring setup for my S420. So I’m left to scour the bowels of the internet with google for strange forum posts from years ago where people have mysterious diagrams and hearsay about how the guitar is wired up.
Therein lies the whole reason I’m writing this post. I rewired the S420 for new Dimarzio pickups and everything actually worked, so I’ll try to document everything involved.
Ibanez Sr1000 Wiring Help
Although I specifically replaced my pickups with the Liquifire and Crunch Lab, all the Dimarzio pickups are wired the same way. Hopefully other pickup manufacturers document their wiring sufficiently to adapt the steps.
I can’t vouch for it other than the Dimarzio and Ibanez wiring, but this appears to show a whole lot of manufacturers and their pickup wiring. There’s a caveat I’ve annotated the picture with about the Ibanez pickups that I’ll get to later in this article.
(If you make a nice and useful chart, give yourself some credit on it, so I can give you credit. Alternately, don’t cut people’s credits out of their charts ya bastards)
Alpha Hh 5 Way Pickup Selector Ibanez Style 2502n
I didn’t attempt to modify any of this, as overall I’m happy with the options. If you want to add more push-pull knobs for coil taps or change what the selector does, you go right ahead, but I didn’t do that.
Let’s start off with how the S420 wiring cavity cutout in the back of the guitar looks in the default configuration. Yes, this looks like a mess, and this is how it comes from the factory. Don’t let that worry you.
You can see the wires with the white cable tie around them are from the pickups, and the row of contacts that are the bottom is the five-way selector switch. I didn’t change any of the potentiometers (“pots”) or the output jack so that wiring will all stay the same.
Best Approach At The Ibanez Jem Hsh Wiring
The pickups themselves are mounted in the pickup cavities routed out of the top of the guitar, and the wires snaked down through holes drilled into this wiring cavity. In order to take the pickups out you have to un-solder the wires here first. So don’t unscrew the pickups and start hauling on the wires before disconnecting them.
On one of those deep dark forum posts and not on Ibanez’s own website (Ibanez: do better). I don’t even know if this is actually for the S420, as it doesn’t say “S420” anywhere on it.
After I sat and traced wiring myself I confirmed that, at least for the pickups, this diagram is correct for my S420. Here’s a diagram showing the relationship between the wiring diagram and that physical picture of the guitar cavity:
Emg & Ibanez Long 4 Pin Jack: Which Wire Goes To Which Connector?
Note that it shows the INF1 and INF2 pickups, which I replaced with the Liquifire (neck position, where the INF1 was) and the Crunch Lab (Bridge Position, where the INF2 was). See how the INF1 and INF2 are shown with the same red/black/white/blue wire scheme for the pickups? Humbucking pickups are two sets of coils, which you can wire in series (normal configuration), or do other tricks like coil-tapping (using only one set), or wiring them in parallel (which the S420 does in switch position 2). For the INF1 and INF2 one set of coils goes to the Red/Black pair, and one set goes to the White/Blue pair.
Here’s a spoiler that will save you some grief later. The INF1 and INF2 pickups are purposely wired with opposite polarity, probably to make the assembly and wire charts easier. This is documented nowhere, other than I found it out myself.
The Dimarzio pickups are all wired “the same way” with respect to polarity. The pairs are Red/Black and White/Green (not blue, don’t worry about that). The polarity on the Liquifire and Crunch Lab (and I assume all Dimarzio pickups) are the same.
Common Electric Guitar Wiring Diagrams
This means that when you replace the INF2 (bridge) pickup with a Dimarzio, you have to reverse a set of the coils, or else the pickup will be “out of phase” with the neck pickup. You’ll get what happened to me: Neck pickup (position 1) sounds fine. Bridge pickup (position 5) sounds fine. Neck + Bridge (position 3) sounds thin and tinny, when it should sound full and complete like the pickups do by themselves.
Pickup polarity actually does not matter – except when you’re mixing signals from more than one pickup. It’s not “wrong” to wire up the Neck and Bridge out of phase, it’s just not how the INF1/INF2 are setup, and I think it sounds terrible. Position 4 (part of neck, part of bridge) has the out-of-phase sound already if you want that.
In my case, I soldered the wires all on, put it all back together and tried it to just to be very disappointed with the sound in positions 2, 3, and 4. I recognized the out-of-phase sound and set about reversing the coils on the Crunch Lab to correct it. After the fact I measured the INF1 and INF2 to verify that yes, despite common wiring schemes they are inverse polarity.
Hsh 2 Conductor Wiring Diagram?
I used the technique similar to this youtube video or documented in text here. Both those references are pretty good and explain what you need to do. I’ve already done the work for you though, and confirmed for myself that my INF1 and INF2 have opposite polarity.
So with that little fact in mind, here’s an updated S420 wiring diagram that shows the connections for the new Dimarzio pickups.
To actually do the change, unsolder the wires from the existing pickups, and be aware that you’ll have to snake the wires back through the small hole in the body, so don’t leave a lot of jagged garbage on the ends. Be smart and take pictures or document your stuff like I did before you take it apart.
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I’m such a lazy bastard I didn’t even take the strings off to remove
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