The official "How to make Strats sound fat" SDUGF guide/thread.

[Vasshu the humanoid typhoon]

Re: The official "How to make Strats sound fat" SDUGF guide/thread.

Buy a good one from the start....
Do not mess with a mediocre one from the start...it will stay mediocre even with a thousand steel sustain blocks and cryo blocks.....

If you want ash, get one that weighs nothing and is expensive....the you get what you pay for applies here as well.....

The whole blocked trem is just too much, if you want =)&(/¤(/%¤)/0 bloody hardtail, get one!!!

Don't think, play more and get to know it!

I have had about a million strats in the last 25 years......
I use a not very cheap old Navigator now, 12-54 strings, big action, small frets, vibrato set up for backwards motion, a whole third or something like that...
Standart tuning.

I play almost everyday, I know it fairly well now, and it has benefitted from being played all the time!
Good strings helps alot, but they are a dying breed in the day of cost savings and cheapa$$ crap steel.....

You can get ok guitars in the lowermiddle area...but they will stay just good strats....
There is no way around it today, good wood is not cheap anymore!!!

And to be honest, get it from those who made for decades.....they do know what they do!
Just how I see it, as mentioned before, I have had about a million strats from every walk of life!
Modded some of them to death, beaten other up so much that they came apart...
Changed so many pickups that I lost myself in confusion, changed so many tuners that it ain't no fun....

Tried every kind of nut material, stuck to either good steel or bone!
Back to strings, it helps with good ones, and depending on how you play, gauge does not really matter.....it is the touch.....well!!!

Tons of myths and crap......keep it simple, keep it how you are....
I learned that the hard way in a 25 years period...........
Mine is oldschool though, even the radius is old...

[Pierre]

Re: The official "How to make Strats sound fat" SDUGF guide/thread.

While I agree with the above, there is only one real way to make a Strat play fat. Play her. Play her like you mean it. Go to town on it. The louder you play a Strat, the fatter she'll sound. Getting a decent one helps too; US Strats are good guitars but I find them very lacking these days.

[Vasshu the humanoid typhoon]

Re: The official "How to make Strats sound fat" SDUGF guide/thread.

Actually...they keep improving them....
We can see that firsthand from the store...
But we select them as well....
Those that are lesser sounding or badly made gets the boot....
And guitars can get too refined, too smooth, too much of all that and the sound is out!

[John_L]

Re: The official "How to make Strats sound fat" SDUGF guide/thread.

Swap it for a Tele, Simples. Or if you must have a strat rewire it like a James Burton tele so you get the bridge and neck pickups on together. While you are rewireing swap the two tones for a global treble and bass eq as on the G&L S 500.

[Vasshu the humanoid typhoon]

Re: The official "How to make Strats sound fat" SDUGF guide/thread.

Like a Tele cannot be thinsounding

[crguti]

Re: The official "How to make Strats sound fat" SDUGF guide/thread.

Do you want a fat single coil strat?
use one of this

[AlexR]

Re: The official "How to make Strats sound fat" SDUGF guide/thread.

G&L have done wonderful things with strats IMHO. I've had a couple, and the G&L is the only on that sounded good. Has solid pickups (magnetic field with adj polepieces), great wood and a semi floating trem that stays in tune even doing divebombs.

[John_L]

Re: The official "How to make Strats sound fat" SDUGF guide/thread.

What you have to remember is that the strat was made in 1954. Think back to the mid 50's and who was playing Fender Guitars most of them were local Californian playing country music. The Bakersfield sound is what they were creating. No bass what so ever in fact the original three position strat was designed to give you the same pallet as the Esquire just in a higher fidelity. It was later that people started to get the 'in between' sounds and use them blues. The Rock and Roll of the mid 50's was played by men like Franny Beecher and Scottie Moore using hollow bodied guitars and the pop music of the time did use some strats but the horns were the lead instrument. So when it comes to making the strat sound fat you are starting from a disadvantage.
My advice is to dump Fenders noiseless pickups and get a nice matched set of Seymour's and wire them in such a way that you can select the bridge and neck pickups together. That is where the fat sounds on a Tele come from.

[Vasshu the humanoid typhoon]

Re: The official "How to make Strats sound fat" SDUGF guide/thread.

^Not tried many good strats eh??

[FuseG4]

Re: The official "How to make Strats sound fat" SDUGF guide/thread.

I'm a fan of a slightly hotter bridge pickup for output balance and a lil treble rolloff (sorry, no "let it rain" tones on my strat), and rewiring the 2nd tone control to affect the bridge and middle or have it on just the bridge. if you do miss that "bridge wide open" tone, do a no-load pot.

I have a 9.5" radius neck and so I picked flat pole-piece pickups for the middle and neck. I think a certain sense of fatness comes from the output being balanced across the strings.

I'm also a fan of higher action. Fender's specs as listed in the current manual are pretty good, and maybe 1/64" higher. I don't feel like this has so much to do with pickup height as I've tried all sorts of action settings but I always adjusted the pickups to be the same distance from the strings. Higher action just sounds more resonant to me, with whatever pickup height.

+1 on the fuzz pedal thing. A touch of fuzz after an overdrive pedal makes for instant fatness from just about any single coil I can think of.

I bought a strat partly because I love the sound of the floating trem. Tokai didn't call their strat copy the "springy sound" for no reason! If I want a hardtail single coil guitar, I have a tele.

[John_L]

Re: The official "How to make Strats sound fat" SDUGF guide/thread.

Yep but all the good ones had Lace pickup's or G&L on the head.
The best one I ever played was a 70's natural which had a fixed bridge and you could get the bridge and neck sound (Fender did offer this at the time)

[AudioWonderland]

Re: The official "How to make Strats sound fat" SDUGF guide/thread.

the string height thing and the relaxed picking style apply to all guitars whether the yare nylon string of shedder axes are regular strats. The rest of the the stuff is relevant tho,,,and id like to add my 2c worth....non rwrp pickup sets also sound cool and positions 2 ans 45 are thicker than rwrp sets.
Also id like to show some love for the american standard bridge that has been around since the mid 80s. Its not very fashionable right now, but the big saddles and the block add a lot of mass to the sound of a strat.

I have always like the American standard bridge as well. I even prefer the original saddles over the the more vintage style ones they went with in recent years

All of that said, my fav strat trem is the Gotoh/Wilkinson v100 2 post. I used it on both of the Super strat builds I did and they are just unbelievable. Even better than the PRS trem that was my previous holy grail.

[GuitarStv]

Re: The official "How to make Strats sound fat" SDUGF guide/thread.

Just roll the tone back a bit and use the neck position a lot . . . boom, painful stinging sound gone.

[guitfiddle]

Re: The official "How to make Strats sound fat" SDUGF guide/thread.

Here's one simple thing...pick near the neck.

Also, the higher the pickups are, the more treble they roll off. Just be careful to lower the bass side until the false tones go away.

Stand right in front of your amp and adjust the treble until it sounds a bit too dark to you. It will sound perfect in the crowd fifteen feet away.

[uOpt]

Re: The official "How to make Strats sound fat" SDUGF guide/thread.

You need just the right treble booster. Don't be confused, it won't make it more shrill. It fattens up the sound. A treble booster that sounds good with humbuckers probably won't for Strats.

You need a delay, better two. One for a very short almost unnoticeable one and a second one for an audible one.

Don't use too thin strings.

A GE-7 (graphical EQ) or similar comes in very handy to make good for lack of bass when playing a combo amp or open-back cabinet at low volumes.