In an effort to make his Telecaster more versatile Leo Fender designed the Stratocaster. A radical double-cut design with a truly unique vibrato bridge and three single coil pickups was what the major changes entailed. The guitar Leo designed is still one of the most popular guitars in the world. The tones are unmistakable ‘Stratocaster,’ and the clear yet warm tones have been embraced by, literally, generations of guitar players. But is that reputation really an earned one, or is the popularity of the Stratocaster nothing but a simple reaction to having nothing else available in the fifties and sixties, with as its penultimate result being embraced by millions of players? And what if the old Strat’s rep isn’t earned, what are its faults?
I am personally convinced of Leo Fender’s brilliance regarding his first two guitars, the Telecaster and Stratocaster. They both had an immense ease of general construction, huge tones that were completely in tune with the musical spirit of the time the guitars were conceived and also in sync with the current musical wishes of guitar players. It was nothing more but pure brilliance. In part it’s of also a self-fulfilling prophecy: the great music written and recorded in the fifties and sixties with Strats and Teles shaped our collective taste in what we ought to find good music and good tone. Nevertheless, the Stratocaster has some design features I personally find absolutely unworkable.

The five-way blade was a master move. Great idea to use one switch to select between some of the most ‘needed’ settings on the guitar. A small rework of most five-way switches gives you a middle position that works a bit better in my opinion: the neck pickup and bridge pickup combined, instead of the middle pickup alone. I tend to gravitate towards the notion that the middle pickup is just for some specific tasks: to lower output in a way the volume pot and tone pot never can, and by adding the ‘quack factor’ when engaged with another pickup. The ‘quack’ is a very difficult thing to comprehend or describe, but I feel it’s a vocal, slightly nasal quality to the midrange. To get that quacky thing going on you need a pickup with a relatively low output. Boosting the output will result in a pickup that’s boomy, so not really useful for those juicy leads many players wish to play; the neck pickup is a perfect candidate for that tone. Biting, crunchy rhythms aren’t pulled off easily too with the middle pickup alone because it’s too close to the neck. So, the middle pickup can’t replace the neck pickup, it can’t replace the bridge pickup: it’s really there to quack.

Having a master volume is therefore an incredibly smart move! On many other guitars you have a volume for each pickup, and a tone pot for each pickup too. With three pickups that setup becomes a bit too much; six pots are too much to work with for almost anybody. It has been tried, but also rapidly abandoned. After all, the middle pickup only needs to voice a specific tone in a specific setting. Extending this analogy it becomes perfectly clear that the tone pot dedicated to the middle pickup is a useless option, too! That pot can do so much better stuff than voice a pickup that’s being used for a specific task and not the main beef of the dish, so to say. Many players rewire their Strat so the bottom tone pot works on the bridge pickup, to cut down the harsh treble that might occur.
Unfortunately, the Strat’s immense popularity is also its downfall. Many other manufacturers started copying the Strat with all its merits and faults, including the three-pot setup. This schematic is even used on the so-called ‘hotrod Strats’: Stratocasters with a humbucker in the bridge and single coils in the neck and middle positions. The third pot as a tone pot for the bridge humbucker makes little sense, in my opinion. A humbucker has, virtually by default, less highs than a single coil, so why would you want to cut out the little treble you have left?
As widely known, you can choose the blend of pickups on a Les Paul when the toggle is in the middle position. I took that idea on a Strat and gave the guitar a master volume and master tone and used the last pot as a volume pot for the middle pickup. That way the overall output can still be controlled with one pot, and only the amount of signal of the middle pickup gets adjusted. This might seem redundant, but the tonal options are immense. You can go from sparkly clean to heavy riffing with the flick of the pickup selector, and with the same ease you go back to a fat solo.

Sometimes it just takes one wire to make something become useful when it was previously borderline useless. I modded all my Starts to have this wiring. It works for all guitars with a five-way blade and three pots. The beauty of this mod is, if you don’t like it you can rewire it without breaking a sweat!