Renesongs wrote
I met a guy the other day that had rewired his Squire Strat from a Guitarnuts schematic using the standard 3 single coil pickups. He had taken out the second tone control and added a couple of switches to get just about and combination of pickups in phase and out of phase, he was getting everything from a Jazzy LP to a bluegrass Tele out of one guitar. I was totally impressed. Ok I'll stop hijacking your thread now ?
Some years ago I figured out a way to have all possible combinations for a strat and yet never be able to end up in an "all off" scenario.
My solution had two Les Paul type switches. One selected middle, middle-and-front, front.This switch's output became an input to the second switch.
The second switch was used to select either the back pickup, whatever was selected by the first switch, or both.
You could extend this with phase switches etc, but I think there comes a point where you have more combinations than you can make use of, and enough to confuse you.
I'd also probably rip out the tone controls and either use the holes left for the toggle switches, or replace them with extra volume pots so I could have a volume put for each pickup.
Richard Thompson has his strats and strat-like axes wired with three volumes, no tone.
Nothing covers ALL bases. There is a trick that I've seen some strat players use. You roll off some tone on the middle pickup, roll off all you can on the front pickup and then sweep the blade switch from one extreme to the other and then back again to get a sort of wah effect. Even if you think you have all bases covered, you probably won't. So the trick, I suppose, is to figure out what combinations are useful for you and then make those available in a reliable, non-confusing way.
