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Vintage threads from the first ten years

Re: switching Am. Std. Strat

:

11/6/1997 9:25 PM

Re: switching Am. Std. Strat

Dave:
>>My spare guitar is a Tele type but
>>with Strat neck and middle pickups...
... and a Tele bridge pickup for a total of 3 (right?) so its closer to a strat than a Tele in terms of wiring options.
. I was going to mention that you can get a really nice series/out-of-phase sound with a Tele, but I don't usually wire my strats that way... (I usually use a 5-way switch in my Teles so that the two pickups are out-of-phase when the lever is up towards the neck and in-phase when it is down towards the bridge. But that was before I found out about 4pole/5position MegaSwitches, which really opens up the possibilities for alternate wirings.)
.
Oh well, let me know how it turns out.
.
Steve Ahola

11/7/1997 4:03 AM

Steve,

Yes three pickups wired like a Strat. I tried neck and bridge pu in series in phase and thought it too muddy compared to the other settings but I never thought to try series out of phase. I have reduced the excessive brightness of the guitar by changing the tone cap to 0.1u. It now sounds more like my Strat. I don’t suppose you can get a new junk guitar to sound like a old USA Strat even if it does have Fender pickups on it.

Dave

11/9/1997 3:08 AM

Dave:
. Series/out-of-phase has a certain "honk" (midrange boost) that I think works greats with a Tele. I used it with a pair of SD vintage stacks; I added 2 - 4PDT mini-toggles between the 2 pots to switch between humbucking mode and what they call "power mode" (non-humbucking with the coils added together like a normal single coil pickup). Incidentally, the DPDT switch circuit included with the pickups will put one pickup out of phase with the other. When I called SD tech support, they said there was no way around that problem so I used a 4PDT switch to straighten the polarity out. I used a push-pull pot for the volume control, with the switch section kicking in series wiring. (I use a strat 5-way selector switch to handle the phasing between the two pickups).
. Series/in-phase linkage will be muddier than parallel linkages, but a TBX tone control set to 10 gives it a bit more definition. I just added a second RWRP middle pickup in the neck position to my Fernandez strat w/ Lindy Fralin's so that the bridge/neck combinations are hum-cancelling. With the 2 pickups linked in series, it is essentially a humbucker- but it's a lot clearer than any humbucker I've tried out.
.
Steve Ahola

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