Some of you "Strat Cats" who've been over to GuitarNuts.com have probably seen this before. The electronics/wiring guru over there, John Atchley, shows a nifty wiring mod for 3-single coil Strats that he calls the "Strat-Lover's Strat". This mod adds a couple of nice tonal options while being fairly straightforward and simple to do, and also doesn't alter the guitar's appearance or the function of the control pots themselves. All the stock pickup combinations are still available. I'm strongly considering trying this on my Strat Plus this weekend.

Atchley's page on this mod is HERE. Basically, it consists of replacing two of the stock pots with push/pulls and rewiring the pickups.

One push/pull allows the bridge p'up to be activated in series along with whatever other p'up(s) are active. This allows you to run the bridge and neck p'ups simultaneously and in series, for a "bigger" sound than Strat's are normally capable of achieving. You can also run it in series with the middle p'up (as opposed to in parallel, which is what bridge-middle position on the 5-way selector switch gives with a stock Strat), or even with all three p'ups at once (though the neck and middle will still be in parallel).

The second push/pull is used to change the phase of the neck p'up relative to the other two. This gives you those interesting nasal/hollow out-of-phase tones, with the neck/bridge in series p'up combination giving the most useful results, according to Atchley.

The GuitarNuts site shows electrical schematics for this modification, but I personally prefer a diagram more in line with what the "guts" of the guitar look like, so I worked up the attached drawing by modifying a stock Strat wiring diagram I found on the Seymour Duncan site. Note that the two 6-contact push/pull switches are not shown where they would be physically (which is underneath two of the pots), nor is their up/down orientation implied from the diagram. That has to be determined during the actual installation & wiring. The choice of which two of the three pots to replace with push/pulls is up to you, though the volume (switch #1) and the neck tone (switch #2) are logical choices.

There is an "optional" part of the mod that also allows you to switch from one tone pot to the other as a "master tone" control when the bridge p'up series switch is engaged, but I personally don't see much advantage to that change.

Attachment 516