Copyright 2009-2022 by H. Gragger. All Rights Reserved. All information provided herein is destined for educational and D.I.Y. purposes only. Commercial re-sale, distribution or usage of artwork without explicit written permission of the author is strictly prohibited.The original units  with their associated  trade-names are subject to the copyright of the individual copyright owner. The Author is by no means affiliated with any of those companies. References to trade names are made for educational purposes only. By reading the information provided here you agree to the Terms of Use.

Good quality guitars are expensive products. Compare this to buying a piece of high quality Hi-Fi equipment. You can expect that the constructors have done their homeworks as far as electrics go. But even if you by a low-priced Mid-Fi piece of equipment, say, a portable CD-player for 30 bucks, you can safely expect that its electrical side follows some sensible rules of immunity against external electrical fields and signal preservation.

Yet exactly most of those high-priced guitars do just the opposite: they are miserably screened, they have pre-war signal and ground layout, and they generally leave a lot of space for improvement as far as signal quality goes.

You may have gotten away with that when Elvis rocked his hips, where everything was low-gain, but times have changed, and many companies have not woken up to this - and indeed - not many customers.

Keeping a "vintage" guitar as stock as possible in this respect is akin to worshiping the strings, that were on the guitar when it was produced 40 years back.

Instead of a list of links, which do frequently expire, I recommend you search the web for articles on items I just touch upon.

GuitarNuts: For screening, look up the GuitarNuts site. It´s their instructions that I followed and those are making a lot of sense.
Ray Marston wrote a series on FET buffers. Some pdf´s around. But there is plenty of articles out there. Any of them would do.
GuitarLetters, Helmuth Lemme: On pickups, their behavior and improvement, look up the sites of GuitarLetters and Helmuth Lemme (in German only, they are not affiliated). Those authors provide a sound insight on pickups - and half the truth (see later on).
Dan Armstrongs "Superstrat": If you are interested in trying the Dan Armstrongs "Superstrat" switching, look for this.
There was an article in Guitar player years ago, and pdf copies and other, better depictions are available.

Replacement Pickup manufacturers: Finally, find a site that offers replacement pickups suiting your taste and your purse - if you find you still want some  after becoming a convert.

With the stock guitar sound I was not satisfied. It sounded amateur-like, no matter what technical measures I employed.
In retrospect, fully understandable - if your basics are not right from the start. That´s when I began looking for replacement pickups, reading reviews, reading everything that was written on guitar pickups.

I was trying to invoke that vintage tone, such as Jimi had it. But what is the recipe for that vintage tone?
We musicians like to indulge in  some gear voodoo, failing to see that at least 50 percent of tone is in the hands. We all know that, but we all neglect that. For example, we think Jimi is Stratocaster, Fuzz Face, Marshall or similar. To shatter that myth, Jimi probably could have played any song over a cigar box with strings and still have sounded like Jimi, while we aficionados have to play Jimi´s songs and use his "official" gear to make us vaguely sound like him. Make sure you read "Get That Tone: Are You Experienced era Jimi Hendrix" on the Gibson site. So much for "vintage sound".
But sure a little bit is gear and that typical sound we know (and I like) stems from using single coils as they were made back then.

When I realized, that there is vast space for improvement, I decided that I wanted to remove all possible sources of sound degradation on my guitar before abandoning the stock pickups. Being an electronics head, improving things by doing them technically correct is second nature to me anyways.

First, I screened the guitar according to the above mentioned instructions. Note, that this alone does shift the tonal characteristics of the pickups (it tightens mid-range and lows) apart from the quietening effect. Although being of non-ferrous nature, the metal "housing" changes the pickup´s behavior. Search the web for "baseplate" articles. I used thin copper foil, a bit thicker than commercial household aluminium foil. Self-adhesive tapes were available, but too expensive. Aluminium foil would work, but cannot be soldered.

I also changed the wiring layout to star-earthing as recommended. This is totally sane for low-signal circuitry. The same applies to creating a separate ground-potential for the screening via capacitor. The guitar really is very quiet now.

I have, by the way, done the same treatment to a Les Paul type guitar, with mixed results. The already a bit bass-heavy guitar (as typical for humbuckers) has become more dense in the bass, which further increased my dislike of such guitars. If you plan to modify a humbucker guitar, I suggest you exclude the pickup cavities when screening. Those pickups themselves are inherently very little prone to pick up noise. All other cavities, such as toggle switch, electronics compartment and plug hole can be covered no problem. Also, all signal routing and grounding measures do apply.

Since the stock pickup selector switch allows only for a fraction of all possible pickup combinations, it got eliminated mercilessly in favor of the Dan Armstrong "SuperStrat" switching with 3 toggle switches, which allows ultimate (and in my eyes, very useful) control over the pickups. You may lose the stock vintage look, but who cares. I want to play a versatile and good-sounding guitar, not a treasured but horrible sounding relic. But this is a matter of taste, other readers might prefer other options if at all.

The 250k log volume pot got replaced by a 500k log pot, which means less loading of the pickup(s).

In line with those measures, I dropped the stock (and useless) tone pots in favor of two rotary switches. One selects between 5 different small capacitors in the magnitude of a long cable´s capacitance to go in parallel to the pickup(s).
This, together with an output buffer, creates humps on the frequency spectrum of the pickups, sounding not dissimilar to a wah-wah pedal set halfway back. Very interesting tone, and due to the smallness of the caps not necessarily noticed as treble cut. Look up Lemme and GuitarLetters on this subject.

The second rotary switch puts several small caps in the same range in series with the signal, providing an effective bass-cut together with a given output impedance.  This is very useful on some pickup combinations, especially when you want your fuzz less buzzy. Note, this does not work (well) with stock fuzz faces due to the wrong impedance it sees. You almost hear no signal when your guitar goes directly into the FF without the buffer. (In my 3rd generation fuzz face implementation, the Poker Face, this has been cured.)

All the above measures (apart from the pickup selector changes) are non-invasive, meaning your guitar still looks stock, although it surely does not sound stock any longer. The changes are phenomenal, yet hard to describe. The guitar sounds fuller, more precise, and - indeed - very quiet.

A widespread hard and fast "solution" to that is a treble bleed capacitor over the volume pot. This works to an extent, but certainly interferes with any resonance we want to create by switching small capacitors in parallel with the pickup(s).
This has been explained at length on the abovementioned sources.

a) the capacity is much, much  smaller than the ones used in standard tone controls and
b) it forms a high-Q filter (resonance circuit) sounding  not dissimilar to a wah-wah pedal set half way back. Listen to the sound files on the bottom.

With the Dan Armstrong setting of course there are pickup combinations possible, which no manufacturer of single coils ever dreamt of. You can dial in parallel combinations that are not possible with the standard 5-way switch and also serial combinations, that are in effect serial humbuckers. Some settings allow for interesting serial / parallel combinations. Those combinations do profit very much of the bass-cut rotary switch. The VP-66 set perform very well in those positions, too.

Some people claim that this type of switching is too complicated for live situations. No it is not. There is some logic behind it and full credit goes to Mr. Armstrong for the sleepless nights he spent over developing it.
Any of the traditional settings are possible with the exception that you may have to toggle two switches rather than one to activate combinations of adjacent pickups, plus it enables combinations like "neck+bridge" (my favorite) or "neck+middle+bridge". There is no provision made for out-of-phase, if you are into that, but I bedoubt the usefulness thereof in the presence of a RWRP pickup (in which case the hum-cancellation effect would be defeated), letting alone the hollow sound that produces.

As with all systems, some favorite settings emerge naturally. I have seen suggestions of performance-oriented two-position switching systems, one combination for rhythm and one for lead, not dissimilar to what Les Paul type guitars have. The Armstrong switching method has something similar built into it. The bridge switch is (mechanically) different from the others in that it is an on-on-on switch with a middle position. Throwing it back towards "serial" will, independent of the other pickups selected, bring in the bridge in serial mode, which inevitably produces a volume step and a fatter (humbucker-like) tone. Vóila, there you have your lead-switch. Be sure to check the sound samples.

Sound Samples

The subsequent recordings have been done using the following setup:

Clean Sounds - parallel (Stock strat sounds except pos. 6+7)

Note:  on the following recordings with pickups in parallel I start playing with all tone controls (resp. treble and bass cut controls) disabled. After a few strums you hear me dialling in some parallel capacity. This may not be perceived as treble cut, but rather as some nasal tone. Towards the end I add some bass cut.

Overdrive Sounds

The subsequent recordings have a treble cut capacitor engaged.

Summarizing I must say, the endeavour was worth every hour. It took about half a day to quieten the guitar (the biggest chunk of work), and that is probably the reason why this is not done on a manufacturer´s base - too labour expensive. A shame for a product that is so high priced. The good news, you can do it yourself. The three-toggle mod consumed a few hours too. But be warned - once you play over such equipment, you are spoilt permanently and you never want to go back.

Time goes by and so does the fixation to a certain music style. Country music is hot! But alas, the bridge pickup is too shrill. Buying a tele was not an option, getting a baseplate was. Since the guitar was already screened with copper foil (which had changed the tone to the better by the way), any more copper was of no use. I had plenty of transformer sheet material, the kind of stamped steel sheets that are used in building transformers, laying around the workshop which I cut down to size. Since this is only 0.5 mm thick, I glued three pieces together for a 1.5 mm base plate. I drilled two holes through this where the mounting screws go, glued a thin strip of duct tape over the magnets (to eliminate mechanical contact that could cause microphonics) and glued this in place. (Note that the iron base plate would hold in place by itself purely by the magnets, but would be microphonic as hell).

I was not disappointed. The bridge pickup has lost its ear piercing quality and gained some body and bottom - and loudness.
Sounds good even in combination with the other pickups, far better than before. Dig out those chicken pickin´ licks and get funkin´!