I’ve been meaning to make some modifications to my strat for a few years now. I bought all the pieces last year and then never found the time to do it. I have a 1996 American Standard Strat in sunburst finish. My dad bought me this guitar in Jakarta, Indonesia. We were living there at the time and I really wanted to upgrade to an electric guitar with a tremolo (I had a Fender Lead II, still have it somewhere).

My dad had a Strat Plus he’d gotten for his birthday a few years before. I loved the sparkly tone of the Lace Sensors, and they were a lot more clean than my standard pickups. They also seemed to roll off the trebles better, there were more clean combinations that I found usable with his electronics.

I started off by purchasing a set of used Blue-Silver-Red Lace sensors from ebay. I got them for a great deal some time last year. They were cheap and I read some good things. They are very different from the Gold Lace sensors. They don’t sparkle but you can get a lot of different tones out of them. The basses are really rich and full, I suspect that’s due to them being wound at a higher resistance. Sometimes they’re too full, for my taste at least. But they’re a lot of fun to play and very versatile. Definitely didn’t quite achieve what I wanted but I’ll save that for another article.

I was pretty sure I’d have to take my guitar to a technician to have the pickups installed. I really didn’t want to do any soldering, I haven’t had enough practice with that. It’s expensive to get three pickups replaced! I decided to look for other options. That’s when I came across the ToneShaper.

I wired my pickups with no soldering. It has a myriad of wiring settings built in and easy to switch. Among other things, it lets you chose what capacitor value to use for each of the tone controls, blend in the bridge and neck pickups ala Lindy Fralin, and even wire the pickups in series. Everything is toggleable, so you can replicate an exact vintage strat, modern strat, or go your own path. I’m a big Gilmour fan so I was really interested in the blender wiring.

I also turned on the volume kit which basically keeps the tone constant as the volume rolls off. The result is a little unexpected! It becomes a pure volume control which is a little odd as now I realize I actually liked the sound my strat made as I rolled off the volume dynamically. I might try the billy mod next (similar idea, different implementation).

I used a new pickguard as I wanted to keep my original electronic intact just in case something went wrong. I did have to desolder the jack and ground cables from the old electronics but fortunately the ToneShaper came with a replacement jack and now I never need to solder again :-)

One word of caution: I think the switch diagram in the ToneShaper’s manual for the capacitor values is mirrored. Did anyone else notice this?

Some pics of the process, click on them for some info.