What to do with 20 year old Fender Strat?

[Old Tooth Hopkins]

Wow, thank you Simon and McCreed.

Now to bring the thread back...haha, I am actually intrigued by the level of details and expertise you guys brought!

Re: Simon, I think my memory is playing tricks on me. As a teenager, I used that strat to play hard rock/Metal and Blues. It was always played through a DS-1 from the Bridge Pickup. I then played in a funk band mostly out of position 4. I hardly used position 3 and 5 on clean tone until my older, mellower, and more tasteful days, so maybe they sound how they should be. I may still consider a tonerider upgrades though.

I was never much of a trem guy, just occasional whammy here and there - so the block didn't bother me. In my hard rock days I briefly flirtted with the idea of floyd rose upgrade, but that would have costed way too much.

Re: Simon, The body I am quite certain is Alder. This mob of MIM are all parts found on American Strats but assembled in Mexico (as the fender luthier told a friend of mine on a plane).

Re: McCreed, I've been happy with the tuners. I got that guitar when I was 16, and not many of my peers had "their own" fenders then, mostly squiers, ibanez and Epiphones. One of the key thing everyone said was how well the MIM Strat stays in tune over a long period of time.

[Simon Barden]

The tuners on electric guitars are rarely the problem with tuning issues these days, haven’t been for a long time, and even the cheapest of kit tuners are very good now.

A lot of the cheap copy guitars of the 60s and 70s could come with pretty terrible tuners with loads of backlash and pretty low gear ratios e.g 10:1. The more slop, the quicker they wore out and they certainly could slip. So it became easy to blame the tuners and often upgrading to a set of Schaller or Grovers would solve most of the perceived tuning issues (often even if that wasn’t the main cause of the problem).

You do get the occasional modern tuner that will not keep tune, but they are very rare. Tuning issues are almost always down to a badly cut nut with excessive friction that doesn’t let the string pass through freely. Sometimes it’s the bridge, but the nut is always the prime suspect.

These days tuner issues are more to do with uneven feel during a tuner’s rotation, going from stiff to light to stiff again. Something that could often be mainly cured with a bit of grease, if only it were easy to get to the gears! Something to be said for open-geared tuners, even if closed gear tuners do keep dust and grit out.

[Old Tooth Hopkins]

Since I've got two gurus on this thread, I might as well fire away my questions...

I found out more about this Strat (which I did ages ago, before my guitar building days, so now with more understanding).

The pickups look like Alnico type but internet says it's ceramic. I think I am now more keen to swap them out for Tonerider ones.

What is preferred, pure vintage or blue set? The RWRF in pure vintage sounds promising.

Do the Benson Pickups and Entwhistle (can't look at that without thinking about John Entwhistle...) worth looking at?

[Simon Barden]

You need to look at the back of the pickup.

Here was my MIM Strat pickup:



You can see the two ceramic magnets stuck to the rear.

With proper Strat pickups, the Alnico magnets are the pole pieces, so there won't be anything stuck to the rear of the pickups.

So you'll need to remove the pickguard to check. It's very hard to tell just from the top unless you have examples of both types of pickup that could have been fitted to hand.

[McCreed]

D'oh!!! Simon beat me to it! But anyway...

The pickups look like Alnico type but internet says it's ceramic. I think I am now more keen to swap them out for Tonerider ones.

You may need to take the pickups out (or at least lift the pickguard enough to see) to identify what type of pickups they are.
With ceramic bar pickups the pole pieces are just steel rods with ceramic magnets attached to the bottom of the poles, as opposed to each polepiece being an individual magnetic rod such as with Alnico single coil pickups.

If you lift the pickguard and can see a long rectangular block (the ceramic magnet) you'll know. Also, sometimes you tell just by looking at the tops of the pole pieces. If there is a concentric circular pattern (like from a machine/lathe) they are likely steel poles. If they are plated with chrome or something similar they are also likely to be steel. Steel poles = ceramic bar underneath.

As far as the Toneriders go, it hard to go wrong IMO. It just depends on what sound suits you. Vintage, modern, hotter over-wound etc.
I have owned and played the Pure Vintage in the strat sets, I have an unused set of Classic Blues waiting for a guitar, have had two sets of Hot Classic Tele pickups and currently my single pickup strat has an Alnico 4 humbucker in it. They all deliver!

I can't comment on the Bensons or the Entwistles as I've never played them (or heard them TTBOMK). I have tried some Entwistle noiseless (ASN-57) they sound pretty good but not as good as the Fender noiseless models I have, and they're really tall so don't fit average cavity depths. NOTE: I don't know that to be true of his regular alnico single coils. You'd have to investigate.

[Simon Barden]

I've never fitted Toneriders in a Strat so can't comment on any specifics.

It all comes down to your own preference in guitar sound. The more vintage the set, the cleaner and crisper the sound will be. the hotter the pickups are wound, the more inductance the pickup has and (for a given magnet choice) the lower down the frequency range it's resonant peak will be and the more the high frequencies are reduced.

This can be combatted to some extent by switching to a more powerful magnet (as a rule of thumb, the more powerful the magnet fitted to a given pickup, the brighter the sound of the pickup). You can also offset some of the treble loss by switching to a 300k volume pot or even a 500k pot.

But in general, the hotter the pickup, the more mids and the less treble you get. I also feel that you tend to get less dynamics from a hotter pickup.

I'm not a fan of pickups that are too hot, as I like versatile guitars. So almost all my guitars a have vintage to overwound vintage specs, nothing hotter (apart from on ny EX-1 kit). You can make a vintage pickup sound really distorted, but it's much harder to make a hot pickups sound good clean.

There are so many pickups out there that it's impossible to say how they all sound, especially how they compare to the ideal sound you have in your head. The Bensons will probably sound a bit different to Toneriders and will probably increase the perceived sound quality by a few %, but not by the giant leap the price difference would suggest. However the Bensons are good value for USA made hand-wound pickups. Pickups like the Toneriders have really raised the bar for low-cost quality pickups that have 90-95% of the character of expensive boutique pickups (though some models will shine a bit more than others, it's just the way it is).

[Simon Barden]

In the end it all comes down to budget and how much you are prepared to spend.

Don't forget that a set of really good pickups can always be put in another guitar.

If hum is an issue for you with single coils, then look at the current (v4) series of Fender Noiseless, or Kinmans (I like my Kinmans, probably in the same way as McCreed likes his Fender Noiseless). Both will fit without any modification to the pickup cavities.

[McCreed]

If hum is an issue for you with single coils, then look at the current (v4) series of Fender Noiseless, or Kinmans (I like my Kinmans, probably in the same way as McCreed likes his Fender Noiseless). Both will fit without any modification to the pickup cavities.

I'd love to get a set of Kinman's but they're very nearly 600AU bucks with shipping. Then there's the issue of "what if I really like them?". Then I'd have to buy another set, and another set...

[Simon Barden]

Available from around £200 a Strat set in the UK, so almost AUD$600 seems excessive, especially as they are supposed to be an Australian design.

[Bakersdozen]

Another suggestion @Old Tooth Hopkins , if your concerned about keeping the guitar original and most of the talk here is about pickups and electronics, why not experiment with a whole new pickguard? Take your old one out and set it aside, it can be simply dropped back in down the track if so desired. This way, you get full reign of new experimentation without feeling guilty. Do whatever wiring mods and pickup shenanigans you desire. While the guitar is apart, give it a general clean up, polish, tighten ALL the nuts, check the fretboard, check the tuners, polish the frets etc. You could also look at loaded pickguards - there are plenty around.