A Better Way to Cable an HSS Strat? A couple of years back, I bought a new Fender Highway 1 HSS Strat. It's an excellent guitar, great worth, great sound. But the pickups that was included with it-a pair of hot Alnico-3 one coils and a high-result Atomic II humbucker-didn't inspire me. Now, a strat can be an easy factor to tinker with, therefore i set about changing the pickups. To replace the too-warm stock single coils, I ordered a set of GFS 60s-70s Greybottom Non-stagger Overwounds. They were a really great deal; about $70 for the set, plus they made a noticeable difference to the sound of your guitar: way more sparkle and punch, and fairly similar output. But the Atomic II humbucker still offered a problem; it's a high-result pickup, way louder compared to the single-coils, and I believe really optimized for generating a high-gain amp. Just as much as I like that, I wanted a decent clean sound too, and I found the Atomic II to become too midrangey to really be likeable clean.After reading many, many reviews, I chosen a Seymour Duncan '59 (the TB59 model which has the proper string spacing for the strat, although I gather this doesn't really make much difference, and the regular SH-1 model works properly well too). Right away I thought the '59 was a better match for your guitar. While still diy guitar effects pedals compared to the single coils, it had been at least nearer, and the clean sound was a lot nicer: a better tone curve overall. But, I still wasn't happy. Despite the fact that the '59 sounded pretty good into my older tweed fender amp, I thought it sounded just a little on the muddy side, specifically noticable when I switched from the center single-coil to the bridge humbucker. Reading everything I could online, I begun to suspect that the issue was that the humbucker continues to be coming through the same 250K pots that strats come with.Gibson generally matches its HB-equipped guitars with 500K pots, which lets even more of the high-end through. This is apparently especially true of the volume pots, which have an effect on the resonant peak regularity of the pickup. Therefore one solution would be to change the volume pot in the strat to 500K. I considered this, but reckoned Fender chose 250K pots for the strat for grounds; they might become too bright consequently. Plus, I thought it would be nice in order to control the quantity degree of the humbucker individually. You will want to re-wire it to have two volume controls instead of one? I would gladly trade one of the tone controls (which I almost never use) for another volume. Then I could have a 250K quantity for the single-coils and an 500K for the humbucker-which is what these were designed for. Appears like a reasonable thing to do, but in the event that you try Googling this, you will discover almost nothing in the form of advice or wiring diagrams. Move figure. Well, I decided to try it anyway.Operating from the GuitarNuts schematic, and looking at it for a very long time, I noticed that the tricky point is to isolate the two volume controls; in the event that you try to wire it up anything just like a regular strat with a 5-way switch, you wind up with the two quantity pots in parallel. What you need, of course, is usually one or the other, not both. The GuitarNuts schematic suggests wiring up the 5-way change in a completely different way when compared to a: you isolate the two halves of the switch (and for this reason they emphasize that this mod is only possible with a genuine 2-pole switch-I got mine from Stewart MacDonald). You utilize one aspect of the change to bring the warm cables from the pickup in and path them to the different volume pots. Afterward you use the other aspect of the change to route the various pots individually to the jack. There is no wire that connects both common terminals, as most strat wiring diagrams present.