Thawing the Ice-Pick
getting a warmer tone from your Strat bridge pickup
For many players, the Strat has one good pickup in the neck. The middle is simply there to occasionally get a weird two-pickups-in-parallel sound or to cancel 60-cycle hum, and the bridge is there only... ONLY for use with a fuzz pedal. God forbid you would want to play your bridge pickup through a clean Fender Twin, you might ruin the hearing of everyone in the first row!
Here are a few tips to warm up the tone of that pickup in order of cost and simplicity.
1. Adjust pickup height $0- Make sure your bridge pickup is not too close to the strings. Depress the high and low E at the last fret and measure from the top of the two poles to the bottom of the string. Make sure the pickup is no closer than 1/16" and adjust the rest of the pickups to match the volume of the bridge.
2. Wire the bridge pickup into the middle tone $0- The classic wiring of Strats is to have a tone control for the neck and a tone control for the middle, and the bridge is left out of the tone circuit. Most modern Strats have the bridge wired in with the middle control. If your bridge pickup has no tone control, here is a wiring diagram to help you:
3. Affix a baseplate to the bridge pickup $4- This mod is cheap, easy, and completely reversible, so why not give it a try? Tele bridge pickups sound amazing because they have a baseplate to raise the inductance, lows, and volume, the same technique can be applied to Strat pickups. Buy a baseplate from a guitar parts supplier and either apply glue or melt some wax to adhere it to the bottom of the pickup (wax is my preferred method as it is easier to remove later). Any metal plating on the guitar should always be grounded. Use a file or course sandpaper to scratch up a section of the baseplate and apply some solder. Then solder a lead from the baseplate to the back of a potentiometer.
4. Replace the bridge pickup with a higher output pickup $85- single coils with a greater resistance (measured in ohms) with have more output, more lows, and less highs. There is a wide variety of drop-in replacements out there that require no modification to the body. Here is one of my Blue Dog pickups that measures 8.1K ohms in the bridge and uses steel poles and bar magnets like a P-90 for a fat, warm tone.
2. Wire the bridge pickup into the middle tone $0- The classic wiring of Strats is to have a tone control for the neck and a tone control for the middle, and the bridge is left out of the tone circuit. Most modern Strats have the bridge wired in with the middle control. If your bridge pickup has no tone control, here is a wiring diagram to help you:
3. Affix a baseplate to the bridge pickup $4- This mod is cheap, easy, and completely reversible, so why not give it a try? Tele bridge pickups sound amazing because they have a baseplate to raise the inductance, lows, and volume, the same technique can be applied to Strat pickups. Buy a baseplate from a guitar parts supplier and either apply glue or melt some wax to adhere it to the bottom of the pickup (wax is my preferred method as it is easier to remove later). Any metal plating on the guitar should always be grounded. Use a file or course sandpaper to scratch up a section of the baseplate and apply some solder. Then solder a lead from the baseplate to the back of a potentiometer.
4. Replace the bridge pickup with a higher output pickup $85- single coils with a greater resistance (measured in ohms) with have more output, more lows, and less highs. There is a wide variety of drop-in replacements out there that require no modification to the body. Here is one of my Blue Dog pickups that measures 8.1K ohms in the bridge and uses steel poles and bar magnets like a P-90 for a fat, warm tone.
