So you have a strat or one of the many other humbucker-single-coil-humbucker guitars with a five-way pickup selector switch and three control knobs. Here’s a very inexpensive set of mods (assuming your humbuckers have the four/five conductor leads) you can make to blow the top off your tonal palate. And the best part is that the whole process results in ZERO cosmetic alterations to the instrument. No one will know you’re packing monster tones until their faces are already melting. Bwa-hahaha!
In this example (my from-parts HSH “strat” type guitar) I’ve used push-pull potentiometers (anywhere from one to five USD each) to turn the knobs on each end into coil taps for each of the two humbuckers. Now, with both knobs in the up position, I can play through the traditional SSS pickup configuration found most commonly on these guitars. That raises the total possible pickup combinations to nine. So how did I get to 17?
The middle knob is also a push-pull pot. In the up position it turns the neck pickup on no matter what position the five-way switch is in. Now, with the middle knob in the up position, I can also play with only the two humbuckers (switch position one) or with all three pickups at once (switch position two). Considering that the two humbuckers now also double as single coils, I counted up the possible pickup configurations and ran out of steam at seventeen.
For more details and answers about this inexpensive mod, comment below!