Today’s post is about a very simple yet effective modification of the tone control on a strat. I personally am a strat man all the way, but i have to admit that I find the tone control(s) a little unnecessary at times. The neck and middle pickups are very balanced when it comes to treble, and the bridge pickup, where a little high-cut might come in handy, isn’t even connected to the tone control. What I did to my strat was to wire all three pickups to one tone pot, and as I really don’t use the tone controls that much, I added a switch that bypasses the tone circuit completely when desired.
The original wiring looked like this.
And in reality, it looked like this:
What I did was to remove the middle pot, add a switch in its stead, and change the wiring to this:
N.B. Output wire removed. Connects to centre lug of left pot.
The result?
A tone control that loads all three pickups equally, which in itself balances the treble content between the three. And it can be completely taken out of the circuit, which is the way it is most of the time when I play.
On another guitar I did the same thing but went even one step further and replaced the tone pot with a trimpot inside the guitar. More on that guitar another time, as it’s work in progress still.
P.S. As You might notice, I also changed the volume pot (from 500k to 250k). Partly to get a softer sound, but also because of the old pot becoming noisy when turned. The tone pot turned out to be a quality ALPHA pot, which is suprising as the whole electronics package (pre-installed on pick-guard) was very cheap. (The pickups were replaced earlier from mediocre generics to Fender Texas Specials).
What's wrong with this circuit? 