Got a great strat bridge pickup lead tone?

Well shucks, that's an entirely reasonable thought, but I'm having a hard time finding one.
Most likely that's a brain blank, but maybe it's just a fantasy in my head that doesn't exist in the real world.

Some of the solos on the end of Bold As Love are pretty fat and sound like bridge pickup. You can hear a fuzz kick in in some spots, so it's not just the amp, but I guess that still counts.
Lots of EJ is that fat thing, but it's HIS specific fat thing, that I can't do, and am not trying for.

So let me turn this around and ask you all:
What are some examples of fat strat bridge pickup leads?
Or is there no such thing?
 
Though I'm not really a strat player, Personally I'm partial to Mike McCready's strat tone. I love that lead on Yellow Ledbetter. Also Neal Schon's tone on Lights.
I do have one HSS strat that I re-did with SSL-6 for neck and middle, with a JB in the bridge and 5 way superswitch. I wired it like a Charvel DK24. That does everything stratty for me. I typically play Wolfgangs (Peavey and EVH), a stock Les Paul or HH super strats with wolfgang pups.
Disregard if this is of no value. :)
 
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I love strats, especially the egonomics, but I have never gotten along with Fender bridge pickups. Way too sharp and thin and then when you try and roll-off the piercing highs all your left with is thin.

I have four strats and I've routed out humbucker bridge routs for all of them. Gotta have the extra beef.

I have found that taking a high output humbucker and having a parallel/series switch in it is the ticket. Having the bridge in parallel and blending in a little neck pickup is the best tone I have ever gotten. Fat, full but with beautiful highs that shimmer instead of shriek.
 
scorch said:
I love strats, especially the egonomics, but I have never gotten along with Fender bridge pickups. Way too sharp and thin and then when you try and roll-off the piercing highs all your left with is thin.

I have four strats and I've routed out humbucker bridge routs for all of them. Gotta have the extra beef.

I have found that taking a high output humbucker and having a parallel/series switch in it is the ticket. Having the bridge in parallel and blending in a little neck pickup is the best tone I have ever gotten. Fat, full but with beautiful highs that shimmer instead of shriek.
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I went the opposite direction - my strat originally had a humbucker in the bridge and I swapped it out for single-coil as the bucker, while splittable, just didn't quite get the authentic sound. Occasionally it would be nice to have that 'bucker tone though! It is tricky to get the bridge pup to not sound harsh/overly bright but a lot of times the only way out is through - you gotta lean into it and push the amp to overdrive and that tends to thicken it up and shave off some of the spike. if that makes sense. But yeah, the bridge pup is just one of those endless battles on a strat, like the G string tuning is on a Les Paul lol
 
Ah, but have you tried a humbucker in parallel? It's a completely different sound. Not thin like a single coil and not thick and hazy like a hot humbucker.

Case in point. One of my strats has a SD Custom in it. It measures 14.4 K ohms. I took it apart and put an Alnico 8 instead of the Alnico 5 that was in it before that I didn't like. Immediately more mids, both low and high. Then I put in a pull-switch pot for parallel/series on the bridge (500k). That leaves me with two 7.20k ohm coils in parallel. Now the amp is seeing 3.6k ohms! Now for you guys are screaming that has got to sound like ass with an impedence that low. But, there is one more thing. Impedance matching for that low coil impedance. Rolling down the ohms of the 500k bridge pot down to around 15k to 25k ( that's not a misprint) makes the tone bloom. I dial in some neck pickup and I have the best tone I've ever gotten. And thats after 50 years of rolling pickup, magnets, pots and switch arrangements, etc.

I know that goes against all the 'accepted norms' but man, it sure works.
 
I love di marzio humbuckers that fits in single coils places . I use them since forever . my strat got 3 humbuckers

With a tubescreamer in the clean channel of a Mesa roadking, it sound like this


(This video is quite 10 years old, but I don’t have a lot without high gain with my strat 😅)
 
I have a SD Red Devil in the bridge of mine and like it. The cool thing about it is that it's made to sound right with 250k pots. That and a tone control for the bridge get me what I want out of it very simply (and I think I'm using a .047 cap).

For a while, I was using a cleaner amp and drive pedals with the strat. At some point I "figured out" the differences in control tapers from my LP and don't do that anymore, I just use much less of the knobs than I do on my LP and deal with it not being as loud (which does mean I use a boost/drive more often).
 
My name is mud said:
I love di marzio humbuckers that fits in single coils places . I use them since forever . my strat got 3 humbuckers

With a tubescreamer in the clean channel of a Mesa roadking, it sound like this


(This video is quite 10 years old, but I don’t have a lot without high gain with my strat 😅)
Click to expand...

Which DiMarzios do you use?

One of my strat-ish guitars is a Vigier with a DP408 in the bridge.
 
Hopefully this'll help…

I have a bright sounding Strat with a roasted maple neck, stainless frets and late 50s pickups. The pickups aren't hot, they're designed to sound very authentic. I don't rely on the modeler to control the brightness using scenes, I set up the preset to sound good with all of my guitars and then use the amp like it's a single channel amp, and control the overall sound with the pickup switch to positions 1 or 2 and the volume and tone controls for the sound I want. Position 2 is my favorite for leads.

I do pretty much the same thing with my tube amps, the gain is on 10, the tone and mid are ~5 and I adjust a little depending on the guitar and my mood if I want it to be thicker and push the tubes harder. The master volume is always on 10 but it's ~22 watt amp so it doesn't get outrageously loud. I rely on physics for the rest.

Things I think about:
  • Having sufficient volume so the speaker shakes the strings which drive the pickup harder which then also pushes the preamp harder, ad infinitum. That fattens the sound nicely. The "Modelers Don't Clean Up with the Volume Knob" Myth talks about it. I hate when my volume is so low that the guitar and amp aren't talking, I want to feel the strings begin to shake when I roll up the volume.
  • On tube amps, as the pre-amp hits the power-amp harder, the sound gets fatter. We can hear that with the modeler by rolling up the master volume control in the amp block. Increasing it too much makes the sound flabby though, so it needs to be set for your full-guitar volume. Cliff talks about that in Setting the Master Volume.
When both of those are working together it gets really fun.

Years ago, before sending the sound of a pedalboard into a clean amp and relying on pedals for the sound was a thing, we'd use single-channel amps and turn them up until they distorted. The switch to pedalboards and clean amps led to people forgetting, or never experiencing, how a real amp reacts, but it's important to the sound of rock and roll to push the amp hard.

Listen to Rory Gallagher's guitar sound. He'd push the preamp hard with a treble-booster, turn up loud which thickened the sound whether he was using his AC30 or his Fender amps, and adjusted his bridge tone control along with using position 1 or 2. When he rolled the volume down you can tell it's very bright but it'd get fat when he rolled it up, and he'd adjust the bridge pickup's tone control.


 
Dave Merrill said:
Which DiMarzios do you use?

One of my strat-ish guitars is a Vigier with a DP408 in the bridge.
Click to expand...
In the video it is fast track 2(bridge), fast track 1, tone zone (neck)

Now this guitar got fast track 2, single coil hs3(? Not sure but it is a di marzio single coil, I need to watch back one day, I change it some years ago), fast track 1 (neck)

In these mini humbuckers series I have also the chopper di marzio in one mustang, and the other mustang got the tone zone in the bridge.

These di marzio pickups are cool . They are a little less gainy than the standard version but you can do a lot of things with them .
 
Might or might not be ideal… the tone control on my Strats are wired to affect all 3 single coil pickups. On most Strats the 2 tone controls only affect the neck and middle pickups. I generally find that (for my taste) the bridge pickup is too bright, so I’ll lower the tone control to somewhere between 5-7. It’s a quick fix. Either that or make a preset / or use a controller to change some eq or maybe engage a drive pedal to get what you’re after.
 
Cainer said:
I went the opposite direction - my strat originally had a humbucker in the bridge and I swapped it out for single-coil as the bucker, while splittable, just didn't quite get the authentic sound. Occasionally it would be nice to have that 'bucker tone though! It is tricky to get the bridge pup to not sound harsh/overly bright but a lot of times the only way out is through - you gotta lean into it and push the amp to overdrive and that tends to thicken it up and shave off some of the spike. if that makes sense. But yeah, the bridge pup is just one of those endless battles on a strat, like the G string tuning is on a Les Paul lol
Click to expand...
This is what I did on my old Strat:
20221203_002933_0.jpg

The black one is a lefty flipped around with reversed magnets, and both are 4+ wired so I can split diagonally. Works great. The 3 way toggle does series/split/parallel on the two bridge pickups....
 
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