advice for strat pickups

[Kitsch]

Hello,

I recently got a cs 70's relic strat (ash body,maple neck),and i love its neck and setup,but it just sounds too thin and quite. I'd like to fatten it up and make it a bit louder as i switch back and forth between a les paul and the strat,and they share the same ac30 with same settings.
I suppose the choice would fall between slowhand and irish tour... The tone i'm after is the edge's black/white strat (bad / i still havent found what i'm looking for, where the streets have no name (slane castle dvd) - NOT the all black he used for later versions of where the streets have no name).
Also,since my main concern is to decrease the volume gap between lp and strat,i suppose true single coils will never match a les paul (57 ri with stock burstbuckers),so my question is: are there any hb with similar tone but lower output? That way i'd raise the strat volume and lower the lp volume and kind of match them in between!

Cheers

Edo

[blue]

i'm not sure which Bkp set will get that tone, maybe Apaches?  but the best thing for closing your volume gap would be some kind of clean boost just to use with the strat.  not boosted enough to add drive or distortion (unless you want to), just to bring it up to the Les Paul's volume

[AndyR]

Yeah, I'd reckon Apaches for the strat as well.

Balancing the two guitars, I dunno - I never managed it properly when I was playing live. There was a period when my main guitar was a strat, the backup was a humbucker guitar. Used to scare the living cr@p out of me when ever I broke a string :lol:

Nowadays, personally, I tend to not like boosting a strat (I'm a strat man at heart). So I'd set the amp to favour the strat more and then use the volume controls on the LP. Having said that, I always used to aim at getting the same tone out of both... these days I tend to use a strat for a strat sound and a humbucker for a humbucker sound - so I'm not sure I'd have the problems I used to experience.

[38thBeatle]

I would say Apaches or Slowhands for a tad more middle.

I have a similar issue to you in that I gig with my Strat and my Gibson 339. I got a switch pedal so that I could keep both guitars plugged in and the one I got has a volume knob for one of the guitar inputs and I can pretty much level the signal by reducing the volume on the Gibson.

In my case, however, I like to use different settings on my amp- so I set the amp up for how I like it with the Gibson and use an eq pedal set up to suit the Strat & switch that on when I need it. Seems to work well with minimal fuss.

[Telerocker]

Apaches, with a baseplate on the bridge.

[Andrew W]

Apaches, with a baseplate on the bridge.

+1 on that. I have this in a maple boarded Strat and the sound is very pleasingly fat.

[gwEm]

A sinner set has just as much output and similar topend to a humbucker, and will do hard rock very well - but its clearly not the tone you are looking for. You'd want traditional strat cleans.

Definitely a baseplate on the bridge anyway - thats a given. Slowhands aren't too far off humbuckers outputwise. Your basically trading strati-ness with output here I guess.

IMO, don't compromise - get the Apaches, a baseplate and some sort of pedal to sort out the level.

(edit: slowhands have a nice stratty clean, but its a bit more hard edge than you'd want, do to the A5 magnets - you could get away with it though)