Getting Nice Tone Out Of My Stratocaster Options

[fkalich]

I have had an American standard Strat for a year and a half, and I never could get to to sound worth a darn, so I rarely played it.

I finally figured it out. Really the answer is on the Fender Site. Here...

http://www.fender.com/support/stratocaster.php

You just set it up according to their spec, and then it sound great!

1) First the Truss Rod, get that right. If you don't, you won't get the action right. Of course if you don't know what you are doing and you screw up, your Strat will make excellent firewood.
2) Also the nut. None of these shops cut the nut consistent. I purchased a set of 9 nut files on Ebay awhile back, you need these to lower it if it needs to be in any slots. Sometimes they really put it too high on some strings there, much higher than necessary. If you don't take it down to a reasonable level, you will really not get the action like it should be set.
3) Now they recommend 4/64th of an inch action at the 12th fret on all the strings on the standard single pole pickups. This is unusual, higher than typical on the treble strings. But with a Strat, buzz really sounds like crap, you can't get away with as much as you can with humbuckers. Also because of the 9.5 radius neck, you can kill strings bending if you set them too low.
4) Now here was the tricky part. You need to set the pickups down some on the standard strats to get a good sound. They said 5/64 of an inch clearance on the base side, 4/64 on the treble. This is really where I was going wrong, having them set as high as I could. The standard strat pickups have their characteristic sound, but I think a lot of this is that they pick up the dissonant harmonics on a vibrating string. But if you set the pickups way high that gets overwhelming, so it sounds like crap. If you set it down then it sounds real good.
5) If you need to, you can adjust the string lengths to bridge after all this.

I now like my Strat, it sounds great. Which is much better than sounding like crap, which is how I used to feel about it.

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This post has been edited by fkalich: Nov 22 2008, 06:01 AM