High-output humbuckers do not break in well and never have. There are "metal" guitars aplenty out there with humbucker pickups that are useless after about 12 to 24 months, depending on how much the guitar was played. The break-in period of a high-output humbucker is quick, and usually takes less than 6 months.
There is no way that you'll ever get electrocuted due to rusty pickups. The one way you might, is if your amp isn't grounded (many older amps didn't even have a ground pin on the plug.). In that case, you should be fine as long as you're not standing in a puddle.
The shape, size, and composition of the magnet, along with the amount of coil wire, the winding pattern of the coil wire, gauge of the coil wire, and the make up and size of the pole pieces are all parts of the pickup that effect the tone.
When they are out-of-phase, the two pickups work against one another; the resulting sound is simply the “leftovers” from the pickups' cancellations. The closer the two pickups are, the greater the cancellations, meaning thinner sound and lesser volume.
So, when you touch your guitar strings, it's you that's being grounded through the guitar. The reason the noise quietens is that when you're grounded, you no longer act as a fleshy meat antenna (careful, now). Ordinarily, you're standing around soaking up various electrical interference from the environment.
The DC (direct current) resistance of a guitar pickup tells you how much the wire coil in the pickup resists electron flow through the system. Knowing the resistance (measured in kiloOhms or kΩ) only tells you one tiny bit about a pickup and it's potential performance and sound.
There are three ways you can try to
identify what
pickups you're using: by looks, by sound, and by the
guitar.
Identifying Pickups Visually
- Single coil pickups are small and thin.
- P90 pickups look like single coils except they are a bit wider.
- Humbucker pickups are much wider, usually twice the size of a single coil.
1) Tip to tip (hot)
- Set your multimeter to resistance (ohms; symbol: Ω), choosing a very small scale.
- Place both plugs of the same cable on the wooden surface of your table.
- Touch both plug tips with the probes – the red one going to one plug, the black one to the other.
If the guitar exhibits no output from any of its pickups the first thing to check is the wiring at the jack and the switch. You just need to make sure that the output jack of the guitar isn't shorted to ground and is properly grounded to the same location as the pickup ground.
Once you've established the right way to wire the humbuckers, all that's left is to establish the relative phase of the single coil with respect to them. Again, just pick a wire, for example white, and connect it to ground, and the other one (red) as hot.
First, the coils can be wired in series or parallel, the coils can be in-phase or out-of-phase with each other. The traditional humbucker is wired in series, out-of-phase (see diagram #1).
This is why most Strat middle pickups and Tele neck pickups are what is known as reverse wind, reverse polarity, or RWRP for short. With a RWRP middle pickup in a Strat, for example, you will get hum cancelling in positions 2 and 4 on a 5-way switch. When this happens, we say that the pickups are out of phase.
Just like speakers, pickups have a polarity that must be matched to the other pickup. Positive and negative If one pickup is wired backwards (positive where the negative should be), it will be out of phase with the other pickup, but only when both pickups are selected. It will sound just fine by itself.
When they are out-of-phase, the two pickups work against one another; the resulting sound is simply the “leftovers” from the pickups' cancellations. The closer the two pickups are, the greater the cancellations, meaning thinner sound and lesser volume.
Most humbuckers are symmetrical and their sound does not change at all when installed backwards. Some humbuckers have a distinctly different sound if you turn them around. There is no right or wrong installation direction. The Bluesbucker® is brighter-sounding with the adjustable screw coil toward the bridge.
