Fender XII pickups - easy hum-cancelling mod?

[alexpigment]

I was lusting after one of the upcoming Fender XII Alternate Reality guitars, and I had to remind myself that my house is haunted by noise (neighbors have dimmer switches on every single light). I've developed some interesting ways to avoid the hum over the years, usually by putting a dummy coil in the guitar.

But then I had a thought - wouldn't it be extremely easy to turn the Fender XII pickups into hum-cancelling pickups? I would think that you could simply rearrange the 4 half-pickups so that you have two pairs of RWRP pickups. On top of that, since each half of a pickup covers a different set of strings, it seems like you would still maintain the single coil character since you're not actually cancelling out any of the same frequencies from the string vibration.

I did a quick Google search to see if anyone had done this and I didn't come up with anything. Does my logic work out or is this just wishful thinking?

[Danley]

EDIT: Was mistaken apparently. I'm actually amazed the originals do not hum-cancel; was there even a point to the split coils? Fender already knew they could make a hum bucker this way (P-bass) and then Leo made G&L Z-coils RWRP so... Anyway, I don't see any reason you couldn't get them re-wound (or possibly flip them per your idea?) to get RWRP; that's if Fender didn't already do this on the Alt. Reality series.

[alexpigment]

I hadn’t considered that they would make the new ones hum cancelling, but yeah, it seems like there would be no downside. I guess I assumed that they would make each pair the same polarity and winding so that the middle position is hum cancelling. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

[Embenny]

My Novak XII pickups were wound as RW/RP pairs by request, but it's true that the vintage ones aren't humcanceling. The Novaks do cancel hum effectively, like a P bass pickup or a Comanche z-coil.

Your plan has a couple of potential pitfalls as I see it though:

1) did Fender ever confirm the neck and bridge pickups will be RW/RP relative to each other?

2) if the neck and bridge pickups ARE RW/RP relative to each other, are they the same output? Because, if they have a higher-output bridge pickup, splitting up the halves as you are suggesting will result in output imbalances between the bass and treble strings in every pickup position.

[alexpigment]

Yeah it was just speculation on my part. I just can’t remember ever seeing an MIM guitar that didnt have RWRP pickups.

That’s also a good point about the different windings possibility.

Thanks for the heads up about the Novak option. Fairly pricey upgrade but you can’t really make pickups for a living in the US and charge less.