OK - My "#1" is and has been for a decade a "telecaster-shaped" guitar. Warmoth boatneck, quarter-sawn maple with a scalloped ebony fretboard, 1.75" nut width, 6100 frets. This was built before both the side-adjuster and SS frets, I've leveled and crowned the frets four times now - but with scalloping, there's still a lot left... :toothy12: It's on a one-piece swamp ash, x-tra light USA Custom body that started as a rear route but now has a front cover plate too, to accommodate the wiring. The neck pickup is a single Lawrence stacked Strat, I think it's a L290? L280? He's changed the numbers a lot. This pickup goes to a concentric tone/volume pot 500/500, with I think a .033mf capacitor? I spent a long time trying different ones. This then goes to a 3-way pickup selector switch, then down the hatch. The bridge humbucker is the L500XL, wired with a SuperSwitch to give me the front coil, back coil, and both coils in series, parallel and out-of-phase. I used this diagram, the "Five-Tone-tele-mod":
http://www.tdpri.com/wiring5wayStrat.htm
That's to wire a two-single-coil PU guitar; I just used the same diagram for the L500 alone. That switch's output goes to another 500/500 concentric tone/volume knob, which goes to the 3-way, then to the output. I'm pretty sure I have a .022mf cap on that. The neck Strat tone is important to me, call it the "Little Wing" tone if you want, Stevie Ray Vaughan used to live there too. It has to be a Strat PU too, the Telecaster neck PU is smaller and different sounding (though there are now a few makers selling "Strat-toned" tele pickups).
The L500 is so powerful that when you split it to one coil, it still has a lot of crank, it's like if you had TWO good telecaster bridge pickups right next to each other. Though as I mentioned, when you combine them it doesn't go all mushy like a regular humbucker. The great joy of this setup lies in leaving the the 3-way switch in the middle position, with both pickups on. I tend to leave the neck PU tone all the way up, and the volume around 7-10 depending. Then by working with the volume and tone of the bridge pickup, and switching from single to parallel to series, it can combine with the neck pickup in a rainbow. You've got five different, switchable, power levels from the bridge pickup to blend with the neck PU - plus the knobs! This is somewhat similar to the "outer-coil, inner coil, three coils" switching that Bill Lawrence first invented when he designed the Gibson L6S, and which has since been "borrowed" by Ernie Ball, Paul Reed Smith, Ibanez, Suhr and a bunch of others.*
However, I have more control of the blending of the values and some tone control
inside the combinations - I grew up on the Gibson four-knob setup, so it seems sensible to me. It is
not simple. When I read about someone who doesn't use the tone and volume controls and instead depends on a bunch of floor boosters and equalizers, oh well... Watch the vids of Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Eric Johnson, Steve Morse, SRV... they're ALL OVER the knobs. The single best example of the four-knob's potential is on Duane Allman's solo from "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed" on the Allman's "Live at the FIllmore." If you can't hear
that, listen harder. "Dark Star"....
I have thought very seriously about another variant for a future build. That would be, a single-coil neck pickup with a tone/volume stack, then a bridge L500 with
separate volume controls for each coil, to a "master" tone just for the bridge PU, then to a 3-way. And maybe a phase switch to flip.. one coil? Two switches to flip one bridge coil and the neck PU? I dunno... I have a perfect system right now, it'd be a shame to build a subsequent boner and have to fix it.... But then I had to rewire this one twice to get it perfect, it's the only way to learn. Brian May's guitar rather famously has an on/off switch and a phase switch for each of the three coils, so there's definitely something there.
*(If Bill Lawrence was interested in spending more time in the courtroom and less in his laboratory, he could extract a staggering amount of money from all the people who've "borrowed" from his patents... When Lawrence was working in Dan Armstrong's shops in London and New York, his assistants at varied times were Dan's son Kent Armstrong, and Larry DiMarzio, and Seymour Duncan - think about it. You could argue that Bill Lawrence is a "lousy" marketer, or a poor businessman, but he's doing what he wants - Leo Fender was the same way, which is why he had to
leave Fender, then start and
leave Music Man, then start G&L. Some people just aren't GREEDY enough... :sad1: They just like to BUILD stuff.)
P.S. No, I haven't tried the P90's - why bother, when you can have two coils for the price of one... if the "P90 sound" mattered to me, I would try one of Seymour Duncan's triple hybrid things anyway. It's my understanding - correct me if I'm wrong - that the characteristics that make for the essential "P90 sound" also make it really noisy and very prone to going microphonic in a few years, or even with one hard bump. It's called "air in the coils" and if you like it, fine. Jason Lollar has evolved some machinery where he can wind pickups with a very precise amount of tension, and pot them to a very certain degree of, umm, "pottedness?" But the "great P90 sound" only happened in a few of the old ones- the rest shorted out and died, which is why it disappeared from the serious guitarist's touring arsenal, with a very few exceptions like Leslie West. In the early 70's guitarists couldn't rout out their Les Paul Jrs. FAST enough, aaak give me a HUMBUCKER.... etc. I'd rather stick with things that sound good on purpose, not by accident.
ccasion14: 
even with wenge. the ebony board and maple top will sort it out nicely. \
so I'm stuck with humbuckers. besides, a les paul with 3 singlecoils looks just... plain wrong 
