HSH Reverse Tuxedo Strat

[mycroftxxx]

Just ordered the body and neck:

Stratocaster® Replacement Guitar Body
Construction: Chambered
Core Wood: Alder
Lam Top Wood: Alder
Control Cavity: Top Rout, HSH, no F-Holes
Jack Rout: 7/8" (22mm), Side
Bridge Rout Type: Tremolo Bridge, Wilkinson VS100
Standard 4-Bolt Neck Pocket, Strat® Shape
Body Contours: Forearm Contour, Tummy Cut, Custom Contoured Heel
Black Binding
Battery: Single (just in case I want an active boost later)
Paint: Gloss Metallic White Pearl Front and Back

Stratocaster® Replacement Guitar Neck
Vintage/Modern
Roasted Flame Maple Shaft and Fretboard
Nut Width1-11/16" (43mm) - Modern Medium
Neck Back Profile: D
Fretboard Radius: 9.5" - 14" Compound
22 Frets Size, SS6115 - Wide & Tall (Stainless)
Tuner Hole Size: Schaller/Modern Fender/Sperzel (25/64")
Standard Dots, Cream; Side Dots Luminlay w/ White
Standard Nut - GraphTech Black TUSQ XL
Standard 4-Bolt Neck, Strat® Heel Shape
Painted Headstock (off-menu option!)

Visually, this will be “white tie and tails” - all white body with black binding, white headstock, black hardware including pickups. Not sure yet if the pickguard will be white or black. I picked an HSH configuration because I don’t have one and I’m intrigued by it; easy enough to convert to HSS if the HSH doesn’t work out, but I’m really more interested in the humbucker tones here, especially some of the lower-output PAF-style such as the Suhr Thornbucker I/II, the Fralin Unbucker, and others. One of the Free-Way 10-way blade switches has all of the pickup switching configurations I’m interested in, so this won’t be a wiring nightmare.

It will be a few months before everything arrives, but I’ll keep this thread updated as I make decisions about pickups and other hardware, and have a full-fledged build thread when everything is here. Fun fun fun!

 

[rockandroller]

Super cool!! Back around 1990 I had a 2HB tele in the same livery

 

[PFDarkside]

Nice! I want to build the black and the white versions of the tuxedo Tele. Cant wait to see it.

 

[Strat Avenger]

'Looking forward to seeing it.

 

[mycroftxxx]

So, something I didn’t know: with a painted headstock, they have to finish the back of the neck too. I settled on vintage nitro satin. The order is now showing “processing.”

 

[mycroftxxx]

The largest decision I have yet to make on this guitar is…pickups. This build is an HSH for three reasons:

1. I wanted to center this guitar around a dual humbucker configuration but with some single coil sound there; I have multiple all-single coil guitars, and even a HSS, but my only two-HB guitar is a LP-style Epiphone (an excellent guitar BTW, and the headstock bothers me not at all) with Gibson 57/57+ pickups that I like a lot.
2. But…I really want the 25.5” scale length; I just like it better than a 24.75” scale. I know scale length has some tonal effects though.
3. My Epi LP weighs a solid 10 lbs, and I was tired (figuratively and literally) of schlepping it out of its case and strapping on ten pounds of wood and metal to get that great early PAF tone.

So, my pickup requirements are pretty simple (hah!):

• Basic tone must be that great low output PAF, with flexibility from lovely clean chimes to that great edge of breakup growl to the full-fledged saturated lead tone of the early classic rock era (and no chugging need apply, thankyouverymuch );
• Splittable to a decent single-coil tone, to work with the center single coil for some quack in positions 2 and 4;
• And a plus if the split sound works reasonably well standalone, giving more usable switching options.

Looking around initially, there were two obvious contenders: the Suhr Thornbucker/TB+, and the Fralin Unbucker neck and bridge. The sound clips I’ve found are great for both, split and unsplit; I have plenty of time to make this decision, so it’s really early in the game.

So, a few days ago I would have said the TB/TB+ are ahead by a nose, but then I ran across the Zexcoil TriBuckers. I have experience with Zexcoil single coils from the guitar I built last year, and I really like them, but I knew nothing about the TriBuckers until a few days ago. Basically, they take one of their noiseless single coil “cores”, and through PhD EE sorcery re-voice it to sound like a vintage PAF, then package it in a HB-sized package along with one of those vintage-single-coil-voiced “core”, with standard 4-lead wiring. Core 1 alone is the vintage single coil; Core 2 alone is the vintage PAF; and connecting them in series yields a P-90-style tone. So, by adding one three-position toggle switch to the wiring to enable and disable specific cores, you can get 15 individual sounds (more if you switch each pickup individually, but the single toggle would do everything I’m looking for). The clips that I’ve heard are very good, standing up to the TB/TB+ and the Unbuckers. It’s probably worth noting that Fralin is working on a very similar product to the TriBuckers, but it’s not out yet.

I haven’t said much about the single coil middle, but I think I want something noiseless and mostly vintage sounding; there are plenty of options there.

Anyway, I won’t be making the pickup decision until somewhere around the end of May, given that the body and neck are likely between 12 and 16 weeks away, but…any thoughts from the other Warmothians?

 

[rockandroller]

super versatile humbucker here:
https://mobile.kinman.com/products/fast-converge-3-pickups.php