It’s pretty subjective but I had a hard time finding information on the subject when (through my own idiocy) I somehow messed it up.  Everyone will tell you what the Fender recommended string height is as measured from the frets but no one really talks about bridge and saddle height.

One reason it’s so subjective is that people like different tremolo setups.  Some like it to float so they can pull up to raise the pitch or push down to lower it.  Others like it blocked off at the back so they can do dive bombs and have it return to pitch quickly.  Then there’s people like me – I don’t use the tremolo at all.  Seriously, the bar has been sitting in my Strat case for years.  So I have four springs on the back with the claw screwed in pretty far to keep the tremolo block tight against the body.

If you are like me and use your Stratocaster as more of a hardtail, then what I’m about to say might help – saddle height makes a HUGE difference.

Up until two days ago I had the bridge raised and the saddles lowered.  I guess my thinking was that the lower the saddles were, the better the string vibration would transfer to the body.  I was mistaken.

After playing a friend’s new Squier Telecaster I noticed that even with the light strings it had a tight, percussive feel, exactly what I want out of a guitar.  I also noticed that his saddles were set pretty high.  This made me think – if a cheap Squier Tele with a screwed down top-loading bridge plate can feel this way, why can’t my Strat?

I screwed the bridge posts all the way down and raised the individual saddles up fairly high, starting with the low E and raising it until there was no buzzing when plucked hard.  Then repeated the process for the other strings.  After that I radiused them a little (my neck is pretty flat) and adjusted so that none of them sounded out of place.

Wow.

It plays incredibly now, and the sound is tight, punchy, and percussive.  It also helps transfer string vibration to the body – hit the right chord and the whole thing vibrates against you.  Here is a (bad) photo of what it looks like so you can get an idea of how high everything is raised:

These instructions aren’t meant for the people who like a loose, spongy, easy feel to their guitars.  It’s meant for those of us who like our guitars to sound full and twangy at the same time, with some bite and growl.  If you’ve been finding yourself unsatisfied with your Strat sound you should try it.

I did an am much happier.

Now that is a gorgeous guitar.  The pickguard is from Warmoth, where they will make a guard to your specifications in whatever material you choose.  They don’t have all the graphical pickguards that other sites offer but do have a good selection of white-ish, black-ish, and pearl-ish colors.  Plus you can have it made to your specs.  Mine is the standard Strat configuration – three single coil pickups, three control pots, switch, 11 holes, standard tremolo route.  The main reason I ordered from Warmoth, besides trusting them after having a good experience with my neck, was that they offered a vintage pearl color.  I thought the standard white pearl would look too bright against the sunburst.  And having seen the result, I stand by that.  The vintage pearl is yellowed so it blends a little more.

To go with the pickguard I also bought Fender aged white parts (knobs, pickup covers, and switch tip) from Mojotone.  They match pretty closely and complete the look.  Installation didn’t take too long – remove all the old parts, remembering where they go, and screw them into the new pickguard without anything coming unsoldered.  The fit was perfect (a little tight for some of the pickup covers, but not a problem at all) and the screw holes matched up to my existing holes in the body.  One was a slightly off but went in just fine.  The guard is solid and looks better than I imagined even.

While ordering from Mojotone I decided to try out a new bridge pickup, the Rene Martinez Strat bridge.  Rene Martinez has a pretty long history in the industry as a guitar tech and worked with Mojotone to develop his own line of pickups.  They tout them as having “that Texas tone”, which is code for the Stevie Ray sound.

Now I’ll be honest – Stevie Ray played a big part in me picking up the guitar.  His tone is legendary.  But it’s not a tone I want to copy.  So why a Rene Martinez pickup?

The magnet stagger was a huge factor.  Rene seems to have realized that many people don’t want a vintage stagger these days, with the super tall G pole.  It doesn’t make sense on modern strings or guitars without the vintage 7.25″ fretboard radius.  Those were made for string sets with a wound third string, which would make it the weakest string (the thinnest wound string), so it needed a little boost.  Almost all of you reading this with an electric guitar have an unwound third string on there.  So that would make it the strongest string (thickest unwound), which means that your lower three magnets are the ones that need to be raised, but not the third pole.

Martinez does just that – the lower three magnet poles are staggered upwards, then the upper three magnets are dropped down.  It gives more balance across the strings.

So far I’m really liking it.  I had never used the bridge pickup by itself – it was thin and sounded way too trebly.  Now I can switch to it and find a useable sound, even when strumming chords.  It also works well in conjunction with the middle pickup for the 4th position.  One thing I found out: the way it is wired is different from standard Fender wiring.  I’m not sure what the technical term is for it, but to make it work in the 4th position without a volume loss I had to wire the black to the selector switch and ground the white on the volume potentiometer.  Had to waste a new set of strings to learn that little lesson.

I like it enough that I’m considering completing the set with a neck and middle pickup from Mojotone/Rene Martinez.  I’m not unhappy with them, and after my failed experiment with the Seymour Duncan APS-2 I thought I was finished with pickups, but life will surprise you sometimes.

Tracking down the cause of the weird clicky sound that sometimes occurs when I play, especially on the unwound strings of my Stratocaster.  I’m convinced that it has something to do with daisy chaining four of my pedals off of one power supply – after Christmas I’d like to upgrade to the Voodoo Labs Pedal Power 2 so that each has an independent supply.  If that doesn’t work… I dunno.  Could be the wiring I guess, from when I changed out the stock neck pickup to the Seymour Duncan APS-2, then back to the stock pickup again.  Or it could be when I installed the Orange Drop .047uf capacitor.  Or it could be in my head.

Songs in A.  A good majority of the songs I’ve come up with, especially lately, have revolved around the A chord (or based around a droning A string).  Can’t really explain this one, our other guitarist thinks it’s because A is right in the middle of the fretboard and I’m just too lazy to move my hand.  He could be right.  It could also be the droning tone I can get – Junior Kimbrough used open string drones quite a bit and I’ve been listening to him a lot.

Guitar Center Studios.  It’s really more of a rehearsal room that lets you take a recording of what you play live home, but it’s a nice rehearsal room where you can tighten things up.  We’ve been using the new one built in Round Rock quite a bit.  The people there are incredibly friendly and helpful, the recording option is handy so you can hear what you would sound like live, and they have good equipment for you to use.  The rooms we’ve been in had a Marshall half stack and a Fender Super Sonic, as well as a bass amp and good drum kits.  (I did try the amps, but use my Blues Junior for recording.  It just has a great sound for me.)  If you need a place to practice I recommend checking it out.

Obsessions that have dropped off:

Upgrading my Strat.  Right now I really like the sound (minus the clicky thing I mentioned earlier), so until I finally decide to blow through money testing out pickups it’s going to stay the way it is.  There was some reading done on tremolo blocks and people raved about how such and such block increased their sustain / livened up their tone / did their taxes for them, but I don’t really have an issue with mine.

Pedal purchasing.  Yes, I’m sure that I’ll buy more pedals, but right now I’m getting good sounds consistently and don’t feel the need to change them out.  At some point I may look at a separate compressor and overdrive to replace the Route 66, but it’s working very well for me at the moment.

Upgrading the Blues Junior.  After replacing the speaker, tubes, and reverb tank (you have to go way back to find that post), it sounds great.  Not that it didn’t sound good before, but now it plays with me a little better.  The Jet City amp is currently being used by our other guitarist so I’m not worried about it.  When he gets the Vox AC15 he’s been dreaming of the Jet City will probably have a little work done.

And that’s about it.  I haven’t written much lately because… well, life.  Teaching and playing guitar has left little time for anything else.  Just wanted to throw out a few thoughts while I had them… and time.

The Seymour Duncan APS-2 didn’t work out for me.  I left it in the neck position on my Strat for over a week and kept monkeying with it – I tried different pickup heights, different string heights, different tone settings… everything I could think of.  It was a good sounding pickup, just not right for my sound.  The low strings were too soft and the plain third string (G) was too bright.  It’s possible that the Seymour Duncan 5-2 would be better but for now I’m back to the standard American Stratocaster factory pickups.

I did change the capacitor on the tone pot though.  First I tried Mojotone paper-in-oil Vitamin T, the .047 value.  The sound was good but when the tone control was turned down it crackled.  It’s entirely possible that I screwed something up in soldering it in, but either way it came out.  In its place went an Orange Drop .047 (ordered from Mojotone as well).  Strats come with a .022 cap in them, which makes them pretty bright.  Changing to the higher value means that more highs get rolled off as you turn the knob – I really like the control it gives me.  And the Orange Drop works very well.

The biggest change came from a pedal.  I found a used Visual Sound Route 66 pedal on Guitar Center’s website, so I gave it a shot.  We just got back from rehearsing at full volume and it performed extremely well – the Fulltone OCD is now in our other guitarist’s rig.  Using the compression (the comp set around 3:00, the volume set to unity, tone at noon) did add a little bit of noise, but not enough to drive me insane.  I turned off the noise gate though – I didn’t like how it trailed off.  The overdrive is nice and smooth (drive at 2:00, tone at noon, volume around unity, bass boost off) and works well with the compressor.  What really sold me was how they both interacted with the London Fuzz pedal.  It tightened up my fuzz tone and made it a little more focused, while still retaining that awesome fuzz sound.

So right now my signal chain looks like this:

Strat (sometimes Tele or Dot) -> Fulltone Mini Deja Vibe -> Visual Sound Route 66 -> Guyatone Micro OD -> MJM London Fuzz -> CAE Wah -> Danelectro Cool Cat Tremolo -> Fender Blues Jr.

I’m really digging it.  Today my tone sounded great for all of the songs we played, and the Route 66 stayed on the whole time.  If you’re looking for a compressor or overdrive that accentuates your sound without completely changing it, I’d give the Visual Sound Route 66 a whirl.

I’ll probably stick with this rig for now, although the search for my personal Holy Grail tone will never be complete.  It’s a journey, not a destination.

Mojotone didn’t carry the Seymour Duncan APS-2 (non-staggered model, for flatter radii necks) so I searched around.  Darren Riley’s happened to carry it at a good price and had the RW/RP version listed separately (many places that carried the APS-2 didn’t distinguish them clearly), so it was easy to know what I was buying.

Aside from a great inventory and easy website, the guys at Darren Riley’s shipped it QUICK.  I placed my order Friday morning in between classes, and just finished testing my installation (it’s Monday evening).  Shipping on any order including a Seymour Duncan pickup was free.

These guys have definitely made me a happy customer, and I know I’ll be buying from them again in the near future.  Check ‘em out if you’re in the market for guitar parts – they have a huge selection and seem to be excellent to deal with.

The last batch I ordered had some issues though.  Maybe something happened in the mailing process, but for some reason my newer sets didn’t feel or sound right.  There was a dryness to them that made it hard to play.  That lasted for two sets.  I didn’t try the third.

Instead I went back to DR strings.  There has never been an issue and they sound and feel great.  But when I changed back I noticed my setup had drifted and needed to be reset.  So I raised the bridge saddles on a string or two and started playing again.  Suddenly my sound was incredibly treble heavy, not the smooth tone I had before.

It turns out that guitars are even more temperamental than you might think.  Small changes can have huge effects on the sound.  A quarter turn with a screwdriver on one component might change your overall tone.  I realized this especially when I was adjusting the bridge height – too low, and everything sounded spongy.  Too high, and my bass strings had a ringing hollow sound.

Pickup height was another area I had to toy with.  Since I don’t care for a lot of treble I set my Strat pickups closer to the strings on the bass side.  I also like a lower output sound, so my pickups are pretty far from the strings.  Basically the treble side of the pickup is close to flush with the pickguard and the bass side is slightly higher.  At some point I might try to find pickups with less treble output but for now my sound has returned.

My point is this: if you’re setting up your guitar, be mindful of how small changes will affect your tone.  Tiny turns make big changes.

Acme Pickup Comparisons

It has direct comparisons of two Lindy Fralin and four Fender Strat pickup sets.  They play the same thing on each one and also the same thing in different pickup positions.  I like that they also used some classic Hendrix and SRV styles for the comparison, as well as some country and funk riffs.  For the Fralin sets they also compared the bridge pickups with and without the optional baseplate.

Now if only someone could do that for every pickup available…

The sad thing is that I never had the chance to see them play.  They would come through town, and for one reason or another I couldn’t make it.  A huge mistake.

Yesterday they played a short set at the ACL Festival and it absolutely blew my mind.  Jammy, bluesy, heavy, and just plain fun.  Luther Dickinson is (as someone else said) the modern day guitar hero.  If you’re interested in guitar music – and if you’re not, I can’t imagine why you’re reading this – you owe it to yourself to check him out.

My favorite moment had to be the acoustic version of “Goin’ Home”, an instrumental jam they do.  Cody Dickinson played some great acoustic guitar while simultaneously keeping the drum beats going with his feet.  I’m sorry, but these guys are clearly not human.  Cody’s electric washboard part was pretty amazing as well.

I’ve seen some great music moments from some legendary bands… but I’m going to be hard pressed to top this one.  It was almost a religious experience – so much energy and such great musicianship.  If they come to your town don’t make an excuse – just GO.

It’s good.

It really didn’t change the basic sound of the amp but it did tighten up the bass and smooth the highs.  You can really hear the tighter bass when doing shuffles – before the change I had to be pretty careful how hard the shuffles were hit.  Now it feels like I can just attack it any way that feels right and it will sound great.  Single-note lines on the lower strings sound rounder and springier, less spongy.

The smoother highs are really what I was looking for.  I know plenty of guitarists love to boost the hell out of their highs but I like a rounder top end when I play.  The Texas Heat removed the shrill sound that sometimes accompanies high notes on a single coil guitar – the bridge pickup of my Tele sounds even better now.  All the twang and tone are there, but just a higher quality sound.

And I think that’s the main point – it didn’t change my sound, but it did make it better.  My Strat’s bridge pickup has never been used much but lately I’ve found myself switching to it more.  It gave me the full range of tone that Leo Fender meant on his guitar without the tinny sound.

So if you’re a Blues Junior owner and have been considering a speaker switch, give the Texas Heat a whirl.  It’s a low-cost replacement speaker that will improve the sound of your amp without changing it.

I’m really digging the tone on my Blues Junior lately, but it never hurts to try something new.  After much trawling through forums and listening to opinions I decided to try a new speaker.  Something that will smooth the top end a little and tighten up the bass.  There are some crazy expensive options out there that are highly recommended, and some speakers that can change the character of the amp.  (Some loved the Celestion Greenbacks for a more Marshall-y sound.)

I like the character of my amp.  Based on Billm‘s (and countless others) recommendation I decided the Eminence Texas Heat would serve me well.  Tonequest tried it in many different amps and said it improved every single one.  Many people said they threw a Texas Heat in their Blues Junior and never looked back.  Others said it’s like a better version of the stock speaker.  It’s an American voiced 12″ that tames some of the “ice pick” sound Tele and Strat bridge pickups can produce while improving the bass response.  Great for Americana, blues, and Southern rock… which pretty much covers everything I can play.

Mojotone had them in stock so I went with those guys.  There was a company on Amazon that had it with free shipping, but I trust Mojotone.  They’re fast, friendly, and reliable.  When the shipping charge was going to run higher due to the dimensions, David e-mailed me to make sure that was alright and apologized for the upcharge.  How many companies will apologize for something they can’t control?  I gave him the go ahead (really wanted that two-day shipping) and it was shipped out 30 minutes later.  And that’s why I will continue to order from Mojotone whenever they have what I need.

It should be here on Wednesday, so I’ll try and give a report on the sound after a little break-in period over the weekend.  This post was mostly another shout out to Mojotone to say thanks for quality service.

Such a rare thing these days.