Strat mod advice (series, parallel, humbucker?)

tweaknoob

I'm thinking about doing some mods to my beloved strat to get some more tonal options. I've never liked the 'quack' positions and am considering adding bridge and neck  parallel in position 2 or 4 and two pickups in series in one of those positions.

I'm also thinking about getting a rail pickup for the bridge but if I do I think this might make any series mod pretty pointless.

If I choose to put two pickups in series, which ones should I go for? Would bridge and neck be a bit muddy together?

Has anyone tried series wiring and compared it adding a bridge humbucker? If so, how did they compare?

Have the series/parallel wiring in my jag and love it, would nice to set up strat with more configurations I'm likely to use

sweepy

S1 switch and no load tone pots, go for individual tone caps and wire the bridge rather than the middle for the bottom tone control. Pickup wise I’ve always gone for a stack humbucker as it retains the classic look

ICBM

With the stock 5-way switch you're quite limited because the 2 and 4 positions are not true switch positions, they're just the ones on either side connected together. With a Superswitch you can do anything you want though.

Bridge+middle in series and neck+middle in series don't sound quite like humbuckers, they sound like somewhere between that and the Strat in-between sounds, but with much less 'quack'. Bridge+neck in series does sound a bit muddy, and in a normal Strat pickup set is not hum-cancelling but actually doubles the amount of hum, so is less useful. Bridge and neck in parallel is a useful sound, even though still not hum-cancelling.

Bear in mind that the two pickups in a Jaguar are quite a bit closer together than the neck and bridge pickups in a Strat, so it won't sound quite the same.

Funkfingers

tweaknoob said:

Has anyone tried series wiring and compared it adding a bridge humbucker?

Yes and no.

Adjacent single coils interconnected in series can produce fat humbucker-like tones. Reversing the phase of one of the two coils notches out some frequencies, making for interesting overdriven textures. (Kinda Magic!)

In your position, I would buy a GFS pickguard kit and adopt this circuit. https://www.premierguitar.com/articles/21307-mod-garage-inside-brian-mays-red-special?page=2