Swindon Music

Hi

Have recently got a Mexican Strat which I really like playing , but it lacks a bit of beef especially with distortion in the covers band i'm playing in (and future projects ). So I bought a Dimarzio Super Distortion S (the hot rails type) to fit to it . I have priced up a few places to do it , but it seems a bit of a waste if its relatively easy to do .

Just wondered if other people had done it before , and how difficult you reckon it'll be .

Thanks

Andy

As long as your happy to point a soldering iron at it . . . . . . .

Should be pretty straight forward for you,

The original single coil will have 2 wires coming out of it, one going to the cover of the volume pot (along with all the other ground wires) and the other to the selector switch.

Simply unsolder these 2 from the bridge p'up , unscrew the original p'up and fit the new one.
You may have to cut the wires to length and then following Dimarzio's wiring diagram, just solder the wires back on, ground going to the volume pot cover and the hot wire going to the selector swich.

simples . . . . .

The only thing about that is its a four wire pickup . So the pup can be coil tapped . Dont really wanna use that function . Just want it to use as a humbucker really

you should have instructions with the dimarzio for wiring options, if not, see here:

http://www.dimarzio.com//media/diagrams/4Conductor.pdf

You 'should' have RED/GREEN/BLACK/WHITE/BARE wires coming out of the p'up, the instructions say to solder the BLACK and WHITE together and tape the join with insulating tape, the RED wire goes to the selector switch, the GREEN and BARE wires are soldered to ground (the volume pot cover)

Hope that helps!

The only thing that is awkward is Strats have 5-way pickup switches, which is a bit of a pain for swapping pickups. Otherwise, it just depends on how confident you are with soldering.

You could have tried getting an EQ or a mid boost type pedal if you weren't confident with swapping pickups around or didn't want to pay to get it done.

Are you sure of this ? I read the PDF and it made no sense to me .

Lending a soldering Iron today , so need to know soon

Andy

You may also want to have a look at swapping the standard 250k volume pot for a 500k pot (which is normally used on most humbucker guitars) - this is pretty cheap to do/get done.

I got this done on my telecaster deluxe, and it made a massive improvement, in terms of general 'beefiness'.

sorry for late reply, been away from the interweb for the weekend!

the pdf is the standard humbucker wiring code for dimarzio (yours is a standard wired 'bucker but in a single coil package), what colour wires have you got on the p'up?

MikeAnsty is absolutley correct, 250K pots are generally used for single coils, by changing the volume pot to a 500k you will get a better response from the humbucker, but will 'darken' the tone of the remaining single coils p'ups. This can be slightly remedied by changing the capacitor on the tone pot for a 47k orange drop cap, but thats really only to your taste and if you want to go that deep into 'chasing that tone' !!!!

Thanks for all the info guys.

I followed what sonie put in his orignal post and soldered it on saturday night . Got to try it out at practice on sunday , it is sounding amazing .


Thanks again for all the advice , thanks

Andy

No worries! Enjoy it!