Strat Bridge Pickup Tone

[Kiwi]

Greetings,

I use Ironstone Gold on my MIM Strat but find that the bridge pickup is very sharp, so looking for the best way to add some tone to calm it. Plenty of advice in Google, this seems to be the most popular way. "Solder a short jumper from the switch terminal for the middle pup tone control to the one next to it, which connects the bridge pup". It will be great to get some advice before I heat up my soldering iron Thanks, John

[petercreasey]

Greetings,

I use Ironstone Gold on my MIM Strat but find that the bridge pickup is very sharp, so looking for the best way to add some tone to calm it. Plenty of advice in Google, this seems to be the most popular way. "Solder a short jumper from the switch terminal for the middle pup tone control to the one next to it, which connects the bridge pup". It will be great to get some advice before I heat up my soldering iron Thanks, John

That's exactly how to do it John, if you need a diagram look on the Seymour Duncan site
Take care

[roger bayliss]

Or you can move the middle one across and put a jumper wire of the neck PU connection to the middle PU connection you moved the wire from. That would give you one tone pot for the Neck/middle PUs and a separate tone one the bridge PU. Plenty of diagrams out on the internet.

[Uncle Fiesta]

My advice is to ditch the Ironstone Golds. I tried a set on my Classic 60's Strat, and they weren't even as good as the standard MIM pickups. Bland and lifeless.

Try a set of 59/62s as I did. you get what you pay for.

[Kiwi]

Thanks everyone. Yes there is plenty of info on the web about the bridge tone but it is great to get reliable help from the forum, so thanks for this. I may well have another think about the "golds" as I have been a little under whelmed by them. I play thru a Vox tvs4 when not using VST. regards, John

[Terry B]

Go for the 59/62's. I put these on my MIM Strat and they sound really great - a big improvement on the stock pickups, which weren't all that bad! I've also replaced the trem block with a Callaham block as I got fed up with a loose trem bar - this is also giant leap forward for improving a MIM Strat. As well as this I changed all the hard ware to gold and used genuine Kluson tuners as I always had a problem with the stock ones, especially the first string which would never grip properly with the result that it took several attempts when restringing to get the first string to grip! I now use 11's which although a little hard on the fingers does give you a better tone more like the original 60's Strats.

[Kiwi]

Thanks Terry I appreciate your input. The wobbly tremolo arm sure is a pain for a lot of us. I just installed a Babizc, Full Contact bridge and tremolo to improve the standard one but I am not impressed. It dropped in OK without needing any mods but it is a struggle to get the tremolo working properly. The instructions were very minimal and while there is a YouTube video on how to set up an American Strat with only 2 screws on the bridge it is no help for the 6 screw MIM so I just set it up the same as the old one. I am just waiting on getting grumpy with the time I am putting into it and then will probably revert back to the std one I had. I think the 59/62's you mentioned are the ones at jonesyblues.com if they are they certainly sound great. I am not in the market for a girl friend but if I was. I reckon it would be easier to choose one than decide on pickups. Cheers, John

[dave robinson]

I think that the 59/62 pickups referred to above are actually 57/62 from Fender. I used several sets of these around 2006 on different Strats and they work better on certain body materials,I can't remember whether it was ash or alder that was best, but there was a big difference, enough to eventually take them off and sell the lot in favour of others which I have kept to this day. There was one Strat that I bought, I believe it was a Classic Player 50s model that had 57/62s fitted as standard and they sounded best of all. The other two guitars on which I fitted the 57/62s now have Seymore Duncan Alnico Pro IIs and Tone Rider Vintage 60s respectively and I never looked back. I had similar experiences with Fender Custom Shop 54s where on certain guitars they were good but on others they were too trebly. It's a minefield out there with pickups and the only way to find out is through experience. Thankfully all of my own instruments now give total satisfaction and I can honestly say that my best sounding and most versitile Strat is the inexpesive G & L, S-500 with Leo Fender's later pickups fitted as standard. Why ? Because that guitar covers many different tones from vintage Hank- modern Hank to Chet Atkins and many others in between.

[David Martin]

There is a much less technical way of dealing with this "problem"...

... just turn the volume control down a little...

[cockroach]

Or adjust the treble control on the amp- Fenders are so 'toppy' that it's often better to roll off the treble on the amp- and use the middle control (if the amp has one- give it more middle..