Which H/S/S set for me?

[LaXu]

I'm currently not quite satisfied with the Seymour Duncans I have in my Yamaha Pacifica 812WX (click for pic). Alder body, maple neck, rosewood fretboard. It's got a SD '59 Model (SH-1, non Trembucker) humbucker in the bridge and two SSL-1 single coils in the middle and neck positions. My issues with the guitar are as follows:

-Bridge pickup tends to sound nasal, also in the fourth position (middle + split bridge pickup), could have a tad more output too
-Single coils could have a little more power to them, especially the neck pickup
-The staggered pole pieces on the SSLs require me to have them a bit lower than I'd like (which could be part of the reason why they aren't beefy enough)
-Turning down the volume pot sucks highs away (should propably do the treble bleed mod...), nasty issue since that's how I get clean tones.

Played acoustically the guitar sounds quite nice and not as bad as it sounds amplified, but I always have this nagging feeling that better electronics could improve it.

I've got an ash bodied, maple neck/fretboard strat with three single coils for vintage strat tones, so I was thinking of making this more of a "modern" strat. Basically what I'm looking for:

-Bridge 'bucker that churns out some nice sweet distorted tones, in Van Halen/Gary Moore (Victims of the Future era..) vein. Should be possible to split for that 4th position middle + bridge split tone.
-Middle singlecoil with some SRVish roar
-Neck pickup with sweet Gilmourish lead tones (think Another Brick pt.2, Sorrow etc.)

I know, doesn't sound like very "modern" descriptions, but basically my idea is classic tones with a bit more output to drive my single channel, class A Stephenson head a bit harder.

[Tim]

We make quite a lot of HSS setups for customers and often prewired to a guard too with mods.

One of the nicest and most versatile HSS sets I've tried was the Geoff Whitehorn 'Crawler' bridge with 2 x Irish Tour single coils. Alot of power, alot of tone and some real beef added to the Strat it was fitted to. It was actually Geoff's own US standard Strat and he dropped it by one of the trade fairs for us to try out-really balanced and very versatile.

Adding a push pull for coil splits as well as auto shunt in pos 2(or 4 if you like)is easy and we make all our HSS sets with RWRP middles.

[LaXu]

Cool! But what's auto shunt (not familiar with the term)? Is it just dropping one coil of the humbucker when when switching to the middle + bridge position?

Also what value pots do you recommend for a H/S/S setup? Currently got a 500K volume pot (actually ~450K) and a 250K tone pot (~240K).

The push/pull coil split would be cool feature as well, though push/push pots are so much nicer to use (got 'em in a Yamaha semihollowbody) but no-one seems to sell 'em...

[HJM]

Trilogies have a great clean powerful modern strat sound, and I recon they can get very close to a Gilmore tone (modern Gilmore w EMGs)

[Tim]

Cool! But what's auto shunt (not familiar with the term)? Is it just dropping one coil of the humbucker when when switching to the middle + bridge position?

Also what value pots do you recommend for a H/S/S setup? Currently got a 500K volume pot (actually ~450K) and a 250K tone pot (~240K).

The push/pull coil split would be cool feature as well, though push/push pots are so much nicer to use (got 'em in a Yamaha semihollowbody) but no-one seems to sell 'em...

An auto shunt grounds out a coil of the humbucker automatically in pos 2 on a 5 way.

I've found that 500K pots work best although 300K are good for a very bright guitar.

We stock push push pots but we can only get linear at the moment in both 250 and 500K. See the accessories page on our site shop.

[PhilKing]

If you want more power in the combination settings you can always use the 4 pole 5-way switch and wire it so the combinations are in series rather than parallel.  This gives a much thicker tone.  I also tend to use bridge/middle and bridge/neck as my inbetween settings.  This gives a telecaster combination which is a bit fatter than the middle/neck that you normally get.  I have my Irish Tours wired like this, and I am going to use it on my Nailbomb/Trilogy set.  

Phil

[Rob Stobbs]

Hi Ya Mikko  :D
I sort of expected to see you here.
Re the Irish Tours..........You Know what I think about these already,
Tim will only steer you in the right direction