Here's a fancy mod that I've been doing on strats since the early 80's. It's the famous strat Elite wiring scheme- Lose the 5-way switch, order up a custom $60 strat pickguard with three holes, ring up the electronics supplier for three specialized DPDT ON-OFF-ON mini switches, get out the soldering iron and go to town.
Back in the day I used to pay- at my DEALER COST, roughly $65 for the stuff you see pictured here. We'd do the full mod in our shop for $125 out the door. Now that we've morphed into a big-time parts and pickup company, we used our clout to get all of the stuff custom made to our exact spec- we bought a lot of this stuff so we can offer it dirt cheap!
Here's what you get- A custom perfect size and shape strat pickguard in Black/White/Black 3 ply- 11 hole pattern identical to USA strat spacing, 3 500K Genuine Alpha brand Audio pots, three ON-OFF-ON mini switches in chrome finish, a .022 Tone cap (if needed) and a 1/4" Switchcraft style output jack. Go ahead- check out WD or Allparts and price that stuff out...
The concept is pretty simple- Each mini switch has three positions- You wire up your strat pickups so that each pickup is independently assignable as "IN PHASE", "OUT OF PHASE" and "OFF". This allows you to get all of the standard strat sounds, plus all of the fun in Phase sounds, plus the ability to kick any pickup out-of-phase with the other pickups. The result is a guitar with 13 individual sounds- all with ABSOLUTELY NO MODIFICATIONS for your guitar or pickups. Here are the 13 basic sounds-
- 1) Bridge Pickup In Phase
- 2) Middle Pickup In Phase
- 3) Neck Pickup In Phase
- 4) Bridge/Middle Pickups In Phase
- 5) Middle/Neck Pickups In Phase
- 6) Bridge/Neck Pickups In Phase
- 7) All Three Pickups In Phase
- 8) Bridge/Middle Pickups Out Of Phase
- 9) Middle/Neck Pickups Out Of Phase
- 10) Bridge/Neck Pickups Out Of Phase
- 11) Neck/Middle Pickups In Phase, Bridge Out Of Phase
- 12) Bridge/Middle Pickups In Phase, Neck Out Of Phase
- 13) Bridge/Neck Pickups In Phase, Middle Out Of Phase
In addition to that- we give you THREE MORE wiring setups in our famous- fully illustrated- easy to follow wiring instructions- You get the following Wiring Schemes-
- 13 Sound Super strat
- Infinite Sound Tri-Volume Super strat
- Humbucker/Single 17 Sound Super-Duper strat
- Infinite Sound Tri-Volume Humbucker/Single Coil Super strat
Yep- use a good set of strat sized Humbuckers and get a 17 sound Superstrat!! Why not grab a set of our great GFS Lil Killers to go with this setup?
