Re: Need some strat advice
With a few minor yet extremely important modifications, Mexican Strats can play better than off-the-shelf American Strats. Most importantly, they benefit from fret work and a replacement nut.
Firstly, the factory fret work is ****. The frets should be leveled, be crowned, have the ends rounded over, and be polished. Fix it up nice, and the frets will be nicer than the aforementioned off-the-shelf American Strat.
And the nut should be replaced with a Graphtech Tusq XL nut IMO. But whatever the material, the important part is that the nut is custom slotted for your guitar after the fretwork is done.
Also, if you are someone who never uses the vibrato, and never appreciates its incidental effects on tone and feel, block that sucker with a piece of wood.
Go ahead and tighten the tuning peg bushings and knobs as well, while you are monkeying around. The tuners are installed too loosely, and the knobs adjusted like ****, in the factory.
Learn to wrap the strings in a self-locking fashion, using the minimum number of turns. I never go more than one complete turn around the post, with any string, and I try to go even less if possible. Fewer wraps = going out of tune less. No need to worry about slippage with minimum wraps, as long as you self lock the strings.
Also, learn to wrap the strings in such a way that the break angles over the nut are about equal on all the strings. This means that you will probably be wrapping the low E and A strings up their respective posts, not down.
Try to eliminate the string tree if at all possible. If you simple can't do it, due to not enough break angle to prevent a sitar-like buzz, then at least shim the tree up to the minimum height required to prevent the buzz. And either lubricate the bottom of the tree or replace it with a tree made of a permanently lubricated plastic.
IMO/IME, the factory pots, jack are really quite fine to leave in as stock.
If you want to get into spendier territory, the vibrato unit and the tuners should be replaced next to my mind. IMO, they are more of a concern than the stock pickups. Probably the best vibrato out there is the Callaham narrow-spaced model.
The pickups are fine for most things. They give you a quite decent basic Strat tone, and they are pretty versatile. You just need to adjust them and your amp to suit your tastes. That said, if you really hate their sound, you can modify them into "mini P90's" fairly inexpensively. It's cheaper than buying a whole set of replacement pickups, and it sounds great. Just contact the guy at Addiction-FX and order three F spaced (52.4 mm) humbucker keeper bars, 18 Gibson-style polepiece screws, and, optionally, 6 skinny Alnico magnets (pick your type, or mix and match). You want to go in and chisel off the stock magnets and the epoxy that holds them in place. Then use a nail punch to tap out the stock slugs. Install the keeper bar using epoxy, making sure that the holes are properly aligned with the empty slug holes in the pickup bobbin. Once the epoxy has cured, go back and trim off the squeezeout. Then epoxy a pair of the magnets, with the same pole of each magnet touching the keeper bar (i.e. either both north poles or both south poles should be contact the bar). A piece of string works well as a clamp here; it can be cut and then chiseled off along with the hardened excess epoxy later. Then you screw in the polepiece screws. Optionally, you can also epoxy a metal baseplate on over that whole assembly, though it will need to be drilled to make room for the polepiece screws. You end up with an Alnico pickup instead of a ceramic one, and you get adjustable polepieces instead of fixed ones. It's a great improvement, and it costs only about 30 bucks and some of your time.
I've been playing Strats for years and I own about 9 so far. I've always had problems keeping them in tune after heavy tremolo use...not any more!:banana:
