A way to make a Strat noiseless

[Peterku]

Let's suppose you have a Strat. You decide to only use the neck and bridge singles w/ a 3- or 4-way switch. You lower the middle single to the bottom of the body routing so that it won't have any audible signal and wire it parallel with the rest of the setup. Will it have any other audible effect on the sound than eliminating hum?

The best thing to do is wire the middle single to the volume pot parallel with the signal that comes from the switch, isn't it?

Or, if you want to keep the SSS setup, you can have a regularly wound, regular-polarity single in the middle position and hide the original RWRP pickup that used to be there deep under the pickguard somewhere else.

What do you think, would this work? I mean the 'dummy' pickup wouldn't have any signal from the strings, but the overall DC resistance would drop to the half or lower (BTW, would it, in this case?) -- I don't know whether it has any effect on the tone and output... :?

[HJM]

I did a similar thing with a dummy coil, kind of works. Trouble is there's a bit of top end loss, and you need the same wind on the dummy as the pickup, so it doesn't work too well with calibrated sets.

Musicman did this on some guitars and basses once. Again it's the old problem, the noise is part of the strat tone....

[Ratrod]

The only true way of making a start noiseless, is to not plug it in.

[Peterku]

Ok, ok, bad idea...