Rabbit Hole #2: Make my own pickups. About $500 for an automatic hand winding station.
Why?
One way to make single-coils hum cancelling is to wind one pickup clockwise with South Poles up,
Then another with North poles up counter-clockwide.
When they are combined, hum is cancelled. Stacked noiseless do this.
But what if you wound 1/2 of a pickup South poles up clockwise, and the other half North poles up counter-clockwise? Also hum-cancelling, but with a more purist tone.
@Lulz4l1f3 NAMMaste my inner guitar mad scientist bows to your inner guitar mad scientist. I asked the why not cool tapping question to myself as a teen not knowing it was a thing. I can’t say it is a very impressive thing (I’m looking at you PRS McCarty pickups). They really should have done unbalanced coils for more top end.
Yeah, coil-splitting on 4-wire pickups produces modest results, and if I remember correctly, PRS does coil-splitting with 3 wires which confused the hell out of me.
@Lulz4l1f3 coil tapping is inserting an output lead somewhere within the full winding of a coil. The PRS McCarty pickups 3rd wire is the tap. They insert it at the halfway point. Coil splitting is shutting off one coil by sending the positive lead to ground.