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Saltons of swing dude...

honeyiscool wrote:The second easiest and best mod for a Strat is to just swap the neck and middle pickups. As in take the middle pickup out, and physically swap it with the neck pickup, no soldering or anything. Nobody uses Middle + Bridge, anyway, so this is good. Now you have Bridge, Bridge+Neck, Neck, Neck+Middle, and Middle as your five positions, with proper hum cancellation in the 2 and 4.

The EASIEST and BEST mod for a Strat, of course, is to sell it and get a more interesting guitar.

yes, because strats are not interesting. what with their 3 diverse pickups and 5 way switch. how dull.

everyone knows the most interesting guitar makes the most interesting music.

honeyiscool wrote:The second easiest and best mod for a Strat is to just swap the neck and middle pickups. As in take the middle pickup out, and physically swap it with the neck pickup, no soldering or anything. Nobody uses Middle + Bridge, anyway, so this is good. Now you have Bridge, Bridge+Neck, Neck, Neck+Middle, and Middle as your five positions, with proper hum cancellation in the 2 and 4.

The EASIEST and BEST mod for a Strat, of course, is to sell it and get a more interesting guitar.

Wow, this is some prime bollocks to smear all over your face on one of those mornings when you get out of bed and think "Aha! I'm going to talk a pile of fucking crap shit about stuff!"

Plenty of people use middle and bridge, brains, including a fair few famous faces. I can think of one famous person who famously didn't use the middle pickup on a strat to the extent that he removed it. I mean, that's the beauty of the strat, isn't it? The fact that it's so versatile. I'm not even a fan, but there's a whole lot one person with imagination can do with one.

For one thing, they could smash it across your stupid smug face.

My first guitar, and I still have it, was a single-humbucker Strat. I actually don't hate Strats. I think the body's great, neck's great, I think they're overall nice guitars. I just find the standard pickup arrangement really dissatisfying. Not only that, I can't actually play them because I've gotten way too used to Mustangs and Les Pauls and I end up strumming right into the selector switch of a Strat (and Tele to a lesser extent).

I just don't like three-pickup guitars in general. I generally like sound of the neck pickup and sometimes the bridge, depending on what it's got there. The 2 and 4 are just plain pointless in my mind in terms of tone because they just don't sound that good to me, they lack the fullness of the Neck+Bridge that I'm used to on two-pickup guitars. These middle positions work for some people, they don't work for me.

Whatever, I still think that Neck+Bridge is more useful than Middle+Bridge, and if you have a single coil Strat and you want Neck+Bridge with hum cancellation, you have to have a RWRP pickup in the neck. I'm repairing a friend's Strat for him while he's off being in the Navy, and that's definitely how I'm wiring this one. Or maybe a 4-way Tele switch, for the series option, and just leave the middle pickup in there for looks.

I know this is the Internet and I'm new here so you're probably assuming that I'm some angry Internet person who's raging at the monitor, but that's really not true. I'm a rather happy person who ultimately thinks all guitars are awesome in some way. I just have strong preferences, though, and feel like voicing them and I don't like Strats in general but acknowledge their usefulness as tools.

why the fuck is everyone jumping on this guys nuts? that was actually a really clever little mod he added to the discussion. anyway...

honeyiscool wrote:The second easiest and best mod for a Strat is to just swap the neck and middle pickups. As in take the middle pickup out, and physically swap it with the neck pickup, no soldering or anything. Nobody uses Middle + Bridge, anyway, so this is good. Now you have Bridge, Bridge+Neck, Neck, Neck+Middle, and Middle as your five positions, with proper hum cancellation in the 2 and 4.

ah yes, very cool. that's much easier than how I put it. the switch positions come out a bit jumbled but you get the bridge+neck sound. yes I agree bridge+middle is by far the least used position.

honeyiscool wrote:The EASIEST and BEST mod for a Strat, of course, is to sell it and get a more interesting guitar.

Mages wrote: yes I agree bridge+middle is by far the least used position.

O rly?
I filed a notch into the selector switch on my first Strat back in '73, because I wanted to get the bridge/middle sound so many top players seemed to be using. The five-way switch was a great leap forward and helped make the Strat even more versatile. Bridge & middle is used by a whole slew of players, including Richard Thompson, who I saw last night. I use all 5 positions for diferent songs.
The big names who do are probably not playing the style(s) of music some on the forum like: Brian May (on his homebuilt 3-Duosonic thing) , Jimi Hendrix, Mark Knopfler, SRV...
...Clapton

I thought most of those guys use neck+middle. that one is a bit more useful IMO.

I saw Mark Knopfler with Dire Straits on their first appearance in the US in January of 1979, at the Paradise club in Boston (probably gone, it was on Commonwealth Ave near B.U.). My ticket cost me $4.50 and I got to sit right up front.

He had a red clay dot rosewood neck Strat, circa 1959-1960. He had a big piece of electrical tape on the pickup switch to hold it in the "bridge and middle" position.

Bridge and Middle pickups in phase This is Brian's favourite pickup combination, which he uses 85% of the time.

That's in phase, as is the case on older Strats such as my '73.

Time to go home, so I'll stop Googling for those references I dug out at lunchtime.

I like Mark's tone and I love his playing style. However, that doesn't really apply to me because I'll never sound like him as long as I hold a pick.

I think if I grew up playing a Strat, I'd feel differently, but I didn't. My guitars were always two pickup affairs for the most part, and I grew accustomed to that sound. And I'm pretty sure Bridge + Middle are in phase too.

I've seen tons of shows at Paradise. It's still around, it gets a lot of the hip new bands that can't quite sell 2,000 tickets yet. Well, sometimes you'll get bands like The Breeders or Dinosaur Jr. who just feel like playing a smaller stage. When I saw Dinosaur Jr. there I got my face melted off because they had the stacks set up like always. It must have been cool to see Dire Straits there.

honeyiscool wrote:I think if I grew up playing a Strat, I'd feel differently, but I didn't. My guitars were always two pickup affairs for the most part, and I grew accustomed to that sound. And I'm pretty sure Bridge + Middle are in phase too.

Yes, I realised as I was driving home ; the difference is that "modern" pickup sets are RP/RW middle, so the sound from the strings is in phase but you get the hum-bucking. Selecting middle with neck or bridge on the '73 doesn't affect the hum much while on the '08 selecting one of those positions reduces hum hugely.

honeyiscool wrote:I like Mark's tone and I love his playing style. However, that doesn't really apply to me because I'll never sound like him as long as I hold a pick.

I saw Richard Thompson on Tuesday night and the similarity in tone/dynamics between the two was remarkable.

ok, I didn't know that about them guys. cool! but yes, like you said...

NickS wrote:

honeyiscool wrote:I think if I grew up playing a Strat, I'd feel differently, but I didn't. My guitars were always two pickup affairs for the most part, and I grew accustomed to that sound. And I'm pretty sure Bridge + Middle are in phase too.

Yes, I realised as I was driving home ; the difference is that "modern" pickup sets are RP/RW middle, so the sound from the strings is in phase but you get the hum-bucking. Selecting middle with neck or bridge on the '73 doesn't affect the hum much while on the '08 selecting one of those positions reduces hum hugely.

...yes, bridge+middle in phase and bridge+middle out of phase are two quite different sounds. out of phase is going to be that thinner sound. however if you wired the RP/RW pickup in the neck position you would then have both the modern neck+middle out-of-phase (humbucking) sound and the old school knopfler/may style bridge+middle in-phase (no humbucking) sound.

there's just stupid amounts of customization options with strats. or all fender guitars really.

This post may not be helpful at all. But I experienced something similar to original poster. I wanted to get that neck+bridge sound but had no idea how to get it. I didnt even think about messing with the switch to be honest and I was totally uninformed about how guitars operated when I attempted to find my solution. It was a bunch of trial and error but I eventually did something similar to what honeyiscool mentioned. But instead of swapping the neck and middle pickup, (I loved how the neck pickup sounded where it was and did not want to lose that feel) I replaced the middle pickup with the same exact pick up as the bridge. This just made my middle pick up hotter than it was before and gave it a sound I was looking for in the 2 position. So I currently have a Blue Lace sensor in the neck and red Lace sensors in the middle and bridge.