Hot rodding strats?

[BoyMambo]

Am interested in how poeple have hot-rodded any of there guitars.

Last year I bought a cheap, but high quality Noyce (local Australian Builder) Stratocaster copy made in the late 70's. Nice guitar, great to play, and this week I plugged in a set of Kinman vintage pickups married to a Cornell pre-amp with mid-boost.

Shall be trying it out over the next few days, so shall update here with my impressions...

Has anybody else done any other interesting hot-rodding or modifications?

David

[Taller]

Strats and Strat-like guitars are made for hot-rodding/customization. Pick-up swaps and switching mods make the most dramatic differences.
From there, you can swap pick guards, necks, tuners,...the list goes on.
The only limit is one's imagination.
And as far as I'm concerned, Strats look good in all colors. Les Pauls only look good in 'bursts, black, gold, and maybe red/wine. YMMV.

[BIG GINGER GIT]

I totally modded my strat by selling it and getting a tele :D

I've got serious GAS for an Anderson Drop Top Classic at the moment though :dude:

[Donk70]

I like to keep my strats stock, but what I have heard of people doing is putting a "dummy" coil in the guitar cavity to make all positions "noiseless", not just the 2 and 4 positions.

[Jim Collins]

Many years back, GP had an article that detailed a pretty serious Strat wiring mod that involved converting the middle tone to a master tone, and converting the outside tone to a four-position rotary switch. The four-position rotary switch was probably a 6P4T switch, if I remember correctly. The rotary switch determined how the five-way selector switch would act. I think the guitar had something like 13 or 15 different sounds. (Several of the seletor switch positions were duplicates.) The new sounds included all three pickups in parallel, the neck+bridge in parallel, and about six different series sounds, some of which featured an out of phase coil.

You had to hunt down a special switch to do this mod, but I did it to a couple of guitars. Very interesting, with some wicked sounds. Naturally, some of them were more useful than others.

It was a fun experiment, but I wouldn't do it, again. When I have a guitar with that many switching options, I tend to concentrate on the switching, rather than the playing.

[Kent S.]

I don't really do stock anything ...I believe in as many tonal choices as possible (although some are more useful than others, but that depends upon the player, the genre of music, and the musical situation itself), I don't find a problem with the switching options, if I find what I like tonally and the switching is confusing, then I generally find another way of accomplishing the same thing. I'm familiar with the rotary set up that Jim Collins mentioned (got a schematic of it in one of my notebooks) ... It really depends on the player and what they wish to accomplish. I personally hold with the series mods for (humbucking singles) Strats ... although I do true single coils for people that have them as well. Again though, it's all personal taste.

[Adam]

I've posted details on this before, but I recently purchased an '87 relic'd artic white MIJ strat and modded the crap out of it. (Oh wait, it's in my sig.)

I didn't do anything too ambitious, just fixed what I saw as "problems." :)

- Replaced the stock bridge pup with a SD Little '59
- Installed Fender no-load 250k pots
- Swapped "Fender Japan" tuners with Sperzel locking
- Replaced hideous Kahler trem with an Fender USA trem (the heavy-duty one)
- Removed a really ugly Kahler locking mechanism and put on a "Modern" Fender string tree
- Put in a Graphtech nut
- Installed a Hipshot Trem-setter (these are GREAT)
- Replaced the kind of sticky white pickguard with a classy tortios-shell one
- Filled a bunch of little holes in the headstock left by the old tuners and locking jobby.

All told, I still have less than $500 in the guitar, and it plays like butter, stays in rock solid tune, and goes from Fender neck-pup glass to full-bore HB roar with the flick of the wrist. :dude:

[Stratmeister]

Besides the obvious... straplocks, PUPs, switching options, locking tuners, roller nut, etc... highly recommeded options are the Tremsetter and Callaham trem block. Tuning stability and sustain are two things a Strat can always benefit from.

[Sherpa]

I replaced all of the stock electronics and scratchplate/pickguard from my '91MIM Fender Stratocaster in one step with an EMG DG-20 wired harness with its own scratchplate/pickguard. Even though it's an active pickup-based system and hence requires a 9-volt battery, there was no re-routing required at all.

The active midrange boost when dimed does a pretty good emulation of a set of P90s verging on humbuckers, but without the hiss and hum. The other active control allows for scooping the mids and boosting the lows and highs, and sounds great with a little bit of chorus added. This is a great rig for recording due to its silence and flexibility.

Active pups are not everyones cup of tea, and I do find that some amps take a kinder view towards them than others, so it is important to check prospective amps very carefully. My KOCH Multitone sounds great with my CU22, Telecaster and other passive pup-equipped guitars, but it takes a lot more effort to dial in a good sound to my ears with an active pup-equipped guitar, and the range of tones are therefor more limited. YMMV, but then that's half of the fun :)

[Ubi]

For my Strat I did just the basics, replaced all the electronics same time with pickguard, wired it differently, blocked trem. For pup's I got noiseless ones (DiMarzio) as all my other guitars have humbuckers, I didn't want one guitar to be noisy where the other aren´t, and by being noisy rendering itself useless. I rather use all my guitars everywhere without too much trouble.



Ubi

[San]

I love Strats but no matter how hard I try I never seem to be able to keep them stock!!

My first Strat was a MIJ '57 re-issue. It got a new perloid pickguard, hot mini humbuckers in the neck and bridge and a three way switch. Th middle pickup ins't ven connected anymore!

My latest is a Std USA Strat and I've only just finished modding it with: lil '59 in the bridge, new Warmoth neck, schaller locking tuners and an earvana nut.

I'm very pleased with both guitars..

San.

[Big Mike]

They sure are fun to work on. My 3 strats, 1 is a modded Hamer Dayton ( New neck only mod as Hamer radius to flat for me) and the other 2 are Warmoth guitars. 1 a hardtai swampash strat w/ Rio Grande Pups, and another is a swampash w/ vintage bridge, graphtec saddles, Duncan lil59/lace gold/ duncan JBjr 1 volume only - relocated- etc. etc. Nothing lends itself to ease of modification like a Strat. So much fun!!If done right, I think you can end up with an axe as good if not better than some of the stuff going out of the Fender Custom shop. Never be a Lentz or a Chapin or Anderson, but a great guitar can be had by hot rodding. Have fun and expirement. That's how you learn about all this cool stuff!