Enhance Your Stratocaster Sound
The SSS Loaded Pickguard featuring Wilkinson pickups as well as a six-position varitone and a warm switch is a really affordable and great way to improve significantly your Stratocaster type guitar.
Stratocaster is a great guitar body. But even the real Fender ones are limited in their electronic options. It’s amazing that Fender never improved electronic from the first day. Except their American deluxe model, the Stratocaster electronics is exactly the same as it was in the first day. That’s why most of the strat player mod their guitars.
Pickups used: Wilkinson MWHS series.
DC Resistance:
- MWHSB Bridge: 6.1K DC
- MWHSB Middle: 5.6K DC
- MWHSN Neck: 5.6K DC
This pickguard features many excellent options:
– the neck pickup switch, also called the Gilmour switch
That switch allows you to turn on the neck pickup independently from the five ways selector. It gives you two more pickup setting: neck and bridge, and the three pickups at the same time.
– 6 position varitone
The varitone is a rotary switch that allows you to select six different capacitor. A capacitor is at treble filter included in every tone potentiometer. The smaller the cap value is, the more treble it is filtering.
The varitone added features six well choose capacitor values.
- 0.047uF
- 0.033uF
- 0.022uF
- 0.010uF
- 0.0047uF
- 0.001uF
0.047uF is the regular capacitor for humbucker pickup type. 0.022uF is the value commonly employed for single coils.
0.047uF is the most treble capacitor, while 0.001uF is the one filtering the most treble.
Needless to say, you must use the tone pot to benefit from each different capacitor. If you’re the type of player who leave the tone pot all the way up to 10, you won’t hear any differences between each of them. You must adapt your playing to a varitone to benefit totally from it.
– Warm switch
The warm option is an on-off-on switch featuring two different resistors. A 100K on one side and a 200 K on the other. The middle setting set the system of.
How the warm switch works
The warm switch is wired on the volume pot. It changes the value of the pot. Selecting the 100K resistor changes the volume pot to 71K and opting for the 200K resistor changes the volume pot to 111K. A lower value of the pot results in a warmer tone with less treble.
The warm switch combined with the varitone offers you great sound possibilities.
Finally, the pickguard was shielded with copper foil tape, and soldering was done with silver solder.
There are tons of different brand that produced Stratocaster guitar. From extremely cheap to more expensive than a real Stratocaster. Acquiring a loaded pickguard is the best and easiest way to improve dramatically your guitar tone at a competitive price. You can get a much better guitar with a low-cost Chinese type of strat or a Squier and a loaded pickguard than a real Mexican Fender featuring original pickups.
The only thing you have to do is to solder four wires. Three ground wires and one hot wire. That’s all. The longest task is to remove and put strings back on.
Get the SSS Loaded Pickguard at senniguitar.com
I’m playing guitar over 35 years now, and I modified my guitars a lot over time. I became quite efficient at making original settings and other electronic parts involved in guitars. I recently launched my guitar parts website. I am selling custom-made electronic guitar parts as well as high-quality imported goods.
SSS Loaded Pickguard – Wilkinson Pickups – Varitone & Warm Switch for Stratocaster Guitar Type
This post is also available in: French
