Gibson Four Conductor, Quick Connect Wiring Differences

A Public Service Announcement


Gibson neck and bridge four conductor humbuckers, wired traditionally, with solder, and to be used only as humbuckers without any phase switching or coil cutting, has long had the same wiring color scheme as one another.

When Gibson began to use printed circuit boards (PCBs) in many guitars like the Les Paul and the SG, at least since 2011 or so, there's a confusing difference in the bridge pickup's coils magnetic polarity and in the wiring color scheme WHEN WANTING TO WIRE IN OUT OF PHASE SWITCHING AND COIL SPITTING.

I have evaluated several different four conductor quick connect pairs of Gibson humbucker pickups and found the same wiring changes in all the bridge pickups.

I created the following picture and am posting it here in case others out there take a four conductor Gibson humbucker from the quick connect era and want to cut off the connector and wire it in WITH either an out of phase switching scheme and/or wiring in switches for coil splitting.

The several sets of four conductor quick connect neck/bridge pairs of Gibson humbucker pickups I've had all had these exact details, and I checked each set several times to be sure of what I was seeing.

 I am including my email address too in case someone sees a problem in my drawing.  I welcome corrections.

UPDATE: February 16, 2019
I have been contacted by a reader, who confronted this issue with the different wiring of newer generations of Gibson humbucker pickups that were produced with the quick connect wiring, as discussed in this post, and in the image/diagram below.
He had Gibson humbuckers with the quick connects clipped off, and wanted to wire his Les Paul into the Jimmy Page "this guitar can do ANYTHING" scheme.
This reader reported that by reversing the bar magnet in the bridge pickup resulted in the both the polarity of the pickup and the wiring then being as if it were an "old" wired Gibson pickup.
That was all he needed to do to "correct" this issue of modern Gibson bridge humbucker pickups seeming to be of different polarity and wiring when compared to the Gibson bridge humbucker pickups of the pre-quick connect era.
My heartfelt thanks to this reader for basically understanding what I talked about in this post, and to find an easy "solution" to traditionally solder wiring in the newer generations of Gibson bridge humbuckers created for the quick connect system. (Not to mention confirming that I wasn't insane in my conclusions here.)