Working on a strat project

[sandman]

I have a MIM strat I picked up from MYLILSS here on rigtalk....Going to use it as a project guitar of sorts....dang thing plays and sounds better than my MIA strat....anyway...I have a question.
I'm thinking of going Dimarzio HS3, HS4 pups. I could buy a prewired pickguard obviously..but I'm thinking I want to do the work/soldering etc.. myself. I am thinking of ordering a pickguard with only a volume knob and therefore not wiring those pups into a tone knob whatsoever. I never use the tone knobs on my current strat (leave them turned up)...and my ESP MII doesn't have a tone knob....what are your thoughts on not having a tone knob with the pups I listed? What volume pot 250k or 500k? What differences would that make? One louder than an another?

 

[JakeAC5253]

I bought a Guitarfetish pearloid pickguard for my strat and it looks great and is of good quality. They have other styles of pickguard available though, take a look around the website. I got the HSS config and wired mine up originally using a 500k pot and 250k tones with the middle and neck pickups modified so that they see a 250k volume pot instead of 500k. As time went on I modified it so that all pickups see 500k volume pot and disconnected the tone knobs. I like it this way.

 

[srinivassa]

Typically people say higher resistance pots make a guitar pickup sound brighter. I think 250k are standard with single coil and 500k standard with humbucker (to compensate for low presence sound) If you want brighter sound, go to the higher resistance. I usually do because I figure I can always roll off the extra treble with the volume or tone knob when I don't want it.

A tone knob is overrated, although Stats have one of the best. You might want to keep the two tone knobs. It's not hard from a wiring perspective. Instead of rewiring any of the knobs, just cut the old pickups out midway. Then strip and solder the new pickup into the old leads, keeping hot and ground the same. Then just tape up the joints with electrical tape.

Somebody will tell me why that's a bad idea, but it has worked well for me.

 

[sandman]

Typically people say higher resistance pots make a guitar pickup sound brighter. I think 250k are standard with single coil and 500k standard with humbucker (to compensate for low presence sound) If you want brighter sound, go to the higher resistance. I usually do because I figure I can always roll off the extra treble with the volume or tone knob when I don't want it.

A tone knob is overrated, although Stats have one of the best. You might want to keep the two tone knobs. It's not hard from a wiring perspective. Instead of rewiring any of the knobs, just cut the old pickups out midway. Then strip and solder the new pickup into the old leads, keeping hot and ground the same. Then just tape up the joints with electrical tape.

Somebody will tell me why that's a bad idea, but it has worked well for me.

bad idea? lol...hey...if it works it works !