OT: are pickups antenna's?

[DavidRavenMoon]

The planes of a humbucker cover touch, you could run a dremel around the edges to leave a gap . There is no need to overlap, true.

No. We are talking about a closed loop around the pickup, not over or under it. We were really talking about foil around the actual coils, not metal covers. Metal covers will change your tone... period.  Some less than others, but they always will. 

The place where you would want to make a slit is in the side. Like this.. see notation "25" in the drawing:



Also notice the front of the cover has been removed.

(this is from the 1970 Rowe Industries patent #3541219)  For you younger readers, Rowe made pickups for many guitar makers, generally under the DeArmond/Rowe name.

The inventor states the following:

"An electromagnetic pickup unit for musical instruments wherein the surrounding housing and adjustment sleeve elements... are slit so as not to act as short circuited electrical loops especially in the resonant frequency range of the unit, whereby promoting higher fidelity reproduction and efficiency of operation of such unit."

The outer coils of a pickup are usually grounded anyway, phase switches aside. So if you think shielding the outside kills the tone, install a phase switch on your single pickup guitar and enjoy.

Can you explain why that makes any sense? "Outer coils" A pickup coil is a long length of wire.  Sometimes the start is to ground, sometimes the finish.  But the outsides (or insides) of the coil are not grounded in a way that act as a shield, because the coil has resistance (which is why it doesn't short out) and there is a time domain issue from the start to finish of the coil. It takes a finite amount of time to get from one end to the other in the wire.  This time shift is called "phase".

If you reverse the polarity (what we do with a "phase switch" but it's not phase we are changing) of the pickup, and leave the shield attached to the common wire on the pickup, then when you reverse the polarity--the shield--which could include the metal cover on a humbucker pickup, will become hot.  You will get extra hum that way!  You might as well use unshielded cable as your patch cord.  That's how much noise you will get.

The correct way to wire a phase switch is to take the 2 wires from the pickup coil, and switch those.  Any shield that is part of the pickup must be run to ground separately from the pickup leads!  You should do this anyway, unless you have a 2 conductor "vintage" style humbucker, with the braided coax.  You can't reverse the polarity on those without first rewiring the pickup. Four conductor wiring is your friend.

For pickups with no shielding, like a Strat, reversing the polarity (phase) wont change the tone, or amount of noise of the pickup.

My understanding of antenna guy is that single pickup guitars are noiseless.
The Guitarnutz system works really well. So strange to take my fingers off the ground and hear no difference.
I wrap my single coils with copper foil completely .

Taking you hands off the strings, and either getting a buzz, or not, has nothing to do with the tone of the pickup, or whether or not a single coil will pick up hum.  They still will.  What you are now hearing less of is hum induced in the previously unshielded guitar wiring, such as done by Fender.  There's no reason in 2008 that the wiring in a Strat (or any other Fender) should not be shielded.

None of my guitars or basses use the guitarnutz wiring, and none of them hum when I take my hands off the strings.  Some of them didn't even have a string ground, and were dead quiet.  It's just proper wiring and shielding.  I also don't use single coils.

But move your single coil guitar near an electrical field source, like a light dimmer or computer display.  It's going to hum.  That's why humbuckers were invented, and why pickup makers continue to find ways to make pickups that sound like single coils, but are really humbuckers.

If your single coil didn't pick up electrical and magnetic interference, it also wouldn't pick up the sound of your strings!   

[ashcat_lt]

None of my guitars or basses use the guitarnutz wiring...

I really don't want to come across sounding defensive here.  Just seems to me like you've got some misconception about what exactly guitarnutz is all about.  Or maybe one of those guys peed in your wheaties at some point in the past?

So what is this "guitarnutz wiring" of which you speak?  We've got a bunch of crazy schemes over there.  Many of them I don't even bother with.  The closest thing I can think of to an "official guitarnutz wiring" would be the Quieting the Beast article to which I linked earlier.  That's not so much a wiring scheme, though, as...

...just proper wiring and shielding.

Edit - BTW, thanks for helping my understanding of that whole coil shielding thing, not that I ever intended to try it.