Hello everyone

I recently got a stratocaster off of ebay and there is a wierd problem with the pickups. When I switch to position 2 or 4 on my 5 way selector my sound goes from nice and fat to really really thin. It is very annoying since i love to Jam out with the neck and middle pickups going but this problem makes that virtually impossible. I know its sumthing wrong with the pickups. It just goes from nice and beefy like a strat should to a very thin annoying sound, like when u have a wah engaged and u have it all the way toe down. Any advice would be apprecitated on how to fix this problem. Thank you!

Sounds to me like your pick-ups are wired out of phase with each other. Some people refer to the "quack" of positions 2 and 4 as the "out-of-phase" sound, which is confusing as I don't think that's actually true.

+1 on the above.

How would i go about getting this fixed?

Reverse the ground and hot wires on the middle pickup. Take the hot wire from the switch and make it the ground and take the ground wire and attach it to the switch where the hot wire was. Then, try it. If that doesn't work, take in to a repair tech. Good luck.

let me know how that goes vic, im about to drop my lacesensors out and put a set of 57/62 custom shop pu's i may try a 1uf. capacitor with it as well, instead of the o22k

quote:

Originally posted by Vic:
(snip) When I switch to position 2 or 4 on my 5 way selector my sound goes from nice and fat to really really thin. (snip)

Hi Vic - That's EXACTLY how my strat sounded when I accidently switched the signal & ground wire from the middle pickup after installing a new pickguard, switch etc. It was a long time ago (around 1974!) but I had the exact same problem you describe.

stratmaniac & klasaine are correct, you've really got them "out of phase".
If you follow THazy's advice & switch the hot & ground wires from the middle pickup back, all should be well!

Let us know how it goes. - Good luck!

Thanks everyone for your help!

Make sure you reverse the wiring on only the middle pickup first.....
Sounds like just one may be out of phase.
rk

That's awesome, I didn't realize Robert posted here.