...can break at any time. This past Thusday at rehearsal, I broke my high E stirng. No big, I replaced it with a brand new one and finished rehearsing. So here we are this Sunday and why did that same string break? Of course this only happens when playing rythm. The song before, I was doing some pretty hard strumming and even had (shock and horror) a SOLO. All that went fine, but shortly after starting the second song the string broke. well, maybe it was a good thing that the sound man had me low in the mix on that one. About the solo; one thing that I've done to my American Standard Strat is to re-wire the first tone control as a "series blender". What this does is put the neck or bridge pick up in series with the middle pick-up. You put the pick-up selector switch in the either the first or fifth positon and trun the blender pot to the full on or #10 notch and it turns those humble, sweet sounding single coils into a humbucker...almost. It doesn't sound 100% like a neck or bridge position humbucker because of the space bewtween the coils. But with some distorton, it simply rocks. Maybe the separation between the coils opens up some clarity in the sound, but it gets loud and FAT. Turn the blender to the off position gives you back the standard Stratocaster tones. It's a cheap ($0.00 - except for solder which I already have) and easy mod that does not require drilling any holes or changing the appearance of the guitar and it is fully reversible. The second tone control/TBX pot serves as a master tone. The TBX (no load tone control on late American Standard and current American Series Strats) has helped me appreciate the series blended single coils on clean settings too. I can even get some faux jazz guitar tones out of it too.
