So I have had my squier strat for 25 years, more or less, and had a hankering to change the pickups in search of as-yet-unknown improved tone. I don't know precisely what I am looking for but I know there is something better "out there"!
Also my guitar is HSS and I have never liked the sound of that humbucker, although perhaps the problem was that humbucker rather than humbuckers in general, but in any case I decided to go single-coil which meant I could swap the whole scratchplate out for a new one with my preferred wiring, and also made it easier to go back should I want to.
I got a batch of assorted pickups from
@Alegree in a recent clear-out including one of his Texan Hailstorm models for the Bridge. The rest were anonymous except for a couple of Wilkinson models.
I checked them all and found that they were all opposite phase wiring from the Texan, and were all same phase magnets, except for two. So I used one of those two as a middle pickup on the basis that it's RWRP from the Texan on the bridge. The neck pickup I wired in backwards, to achieve same phase as the bridge and again RWRP with the middle. Hopefully this theory will work. The other thing I did was make one of the pots a push-pull to add in the bridge pickup, so I can have neck+bridge or all 3 if I want.
There was a slight hiccup with that because I wired it all up nicely with the push-pull as the volume pot, then found that the inside of the body didn't have room for the long switch! Fortunately it would fit if I made it a tone control, so I rewired it to swap those two pots.
I decided to make it all black, including the jack plate, so I bought a batch of bits from Axesrus, and this determined the initial pickup configuration as I don't have enough black pickup covers of the right width as this batch of pickups have a variety of 50mm and 52mm pole spacing (who decided to make single-coil pickups vary in spacing?). So the Wilkinson neck pickup I was thinking of using remains on the shelf for now.
Since this was a 25-year old guitar and I had never cleaned the neck, it was very grubby. I cleaned it all up with baby wipes then applied lemon oil well rubbed in and the result is like a new guitar.
Stupidly I didn't take any "before" photos, but
here it is in action at Leicester, and
here is another. Thanks to
@Legionreturns Anyway here is the "after" picture. I am still figuring out how much I like it and whether to try out the Wilkinson neck pickup but initial testing is promising!
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Just because you're paranoid, don't mean they're not after youWhat should I have used?