Last summer, I decided I wanted an 80s-style superstrat. But nobody seemed to be making my perfect guitar. All I wanted was an HSS setup, a Floyd Rose, a thin neck, big frets, a 5-way switch and a bright colour. But all the guitars I found had one or more of these attributes missing. This went on for months until I gave up and decided to build my own. I got a custom body and neck from Warmoth, and scoured eBay for the bridge, tuners and electrical parts. And you probably already have some idea where I went for pickups.

My first objective was to do the same thing they’d been doing in the 80s, but with a modern twist. So I put two Classic Stack Plus pickups in the neck and middle positions, and a JB Model Trembucker in the bridge. I set up some fancy switching to split the pickups at appropriate times, and to change the volume pot from 250K to 500K when the humbucker was active.

This achieved my aim perfectly: vintage sounds in four of the positions and then a healthy dose of humbucker power with the switch all the way to the bridge end. The first time I struck a power chord through a cranked Marshall with that JB, I knew it was perfect.

But over time, I started to realise that while it had been an interesting exercise, the guitar wasn’t filling as much of a hole in my collection as it could. I have other Strats I can use for those vintage-sounding four positions, so wasn’t there something else I could do with this one?

I decided to have a look at changing the neck and middle positions. With most of my guitars I have tried to get a good balance of clean, overdrive and distortion sounds, which isn’t hard to do. I usually focus on clean, and the distorted tone comes naturally. With this guitar I decided to focus entirely on distortion and let the cleans come from that. I also hoped that I could simplify the wiring.

The first thing I did was put a Cool Rails in the neck position. As with the JB, the first few notes confirmed it was the right decision. At the same time, I changed the middle pickup for a Vintage Hot Stack Plus. It had a really great sound, but the problem was that in terms of volume level, it just couldn’t keep up with the humbuckers either side of it.
I wanted to keep the same kind of tone in that middle position as I already had – it helps with the in-between sounds to have a vintage-sounding pickup there, and a single coil on its own in the middle is a really nice smooth-but-biting sound.

I found my solution in the Duckbucker and Vintage Rails pickups. These pickups are single-coil sized humbuckers, designed to be wired in parallel, and aimed at producing a single coil sound. However, they come with four-conductor wiring, which allows them to be wired in series too. Here we have a pickup designed to sound like a single coil, but with the volume output of a humbucker! Of course, wiring the coils in series does change the sound a little, but the main change is in the output level.

Given that the Duckbuckers and Vintage Rails are pretty much the same pickup apart from in their polepiece arrangement, I decided to go with the Vintage Rails. I think its half-and-half look makes a nice visual transition between the Cool Rails’ black rails and the JB’s shiny poles.

With the switching replaced with a standard 5-way, no splitting, and a single volume control, this guitar now rocks as it should. A little rolling back on the volume lets the Stratty character through, and then rolling it back up brings in that 80s power feel.

Here’s a video demo of the guitar. Keep an eye on the bottom-right corner and it’ll show you which pickups are active and what the volume is set at. The tone is from a digital model of a Marshall stack with a little echo. All the changes in sound within the video are done with the switch and the volume control.

Of course, once I was done with all this I was left with two Classic Stack Plus pickups and a Vintage Hot Stack Plus. A perfect setup for my next Strat…