My Old Pal, My 2003 Fender Strat Highway One HSS

I have this old 2003 Fender Strat Highway One HSS, that I’m still using on a regular basis, and still like. It’s kind of my first “real” guitar, and I’m still happy with it.

It has a pretty cool Fender Humbucker in the bridge, but I never was really happy with the neck and middle pickups. It’s the first model of the Highway One series, they changed the pickup in 2006 for theses models.

Before	After

The New Pickup Configuration

So I decided to get 2 Seymour Duncan to replace my neck and middle pickups. After a few research on the site and forums, I went with the Little 59 for the neck, and the Duckbuckers for the middle. They’re selling this configuration in a pickguard named “Everything Axe”, with a JB Jr in the bridge. But it seems the Funder “Atomic Humbucker” is kind of a copy of it, so I guessed it should be worth trying.

So here is the new pickup configuration:

• Neck: Seymour Duncan Little 59
• Middle: Seymour Duncan Duckbuckers
• Bridge: Fender Atomic Humbucker (a bit rusted, but the sound’s still good!)

Solo Switch, Single Coil/Humbucker Switches, Master Tone and 500k Pots

As I was about to change the pickguard completely, I decided to add some switches in the meantime. I already changed the pickup selector recently, and removed one tone button, I thought I could:

• Add a “Solo Switch”: this DPDT switch would bypass tone, volume, and pickup selector, to directly send the bridge pickup to the output jack
• Add a Single Coil/Humbucker switch for the SD Little 59, and one for the Atomic Humbucker: a 3 positions SPDT switch that would set the pickup as North Coil only / Humbucker / South Coil only.
• Having a Master Tone pot. I would go with a 500k pot and a .1uf capacitor (104), to cut more high if needed.
• Put also a 500k pot as Volume, to have more granularity in volume (but also get more brightness in general).

Final Wiring Diagram

Here is my final diagram of what I would do. The color code for the Fender Humbucker is different from the Seymour Duncan’s. Be careful! I found out that the in the original wiring, Fender reverted the Green and Red wire in their original wiring.

I did not paid attention when I soldered the coil switch, and ended up with a phase issue on position 2 (middle + bridge).

Let’s get our hands dirty and plug the soldering iron!

I also ordered a new pickguard (a cheap one on Amazon), so it would be easier to solder everything before pulling the old one from the guitar.

The 2 simple switches (side to side) are the coil splits for the neck and the bridge. I used one of the tone hole that I wouldn’t use for one switch, and drilled a small hole next to it. As they would not be used during playing, it wouldn’t matter if they would not be easily accessible.

The solo switch will be placed next to the pickup selector. It needs to be easily accessible because it will be used during a song.

After using it, maybe I would have place it a bit higher, closer to the volume pot.

I wired the 2 new pickups, then removed the original pickguard, to get the Fender pickup and put it on the new one.

Then put the pickup selector, and do the wiring. That where it became messy, especially because all of the switches. It implies a lot of wires between all of them.

Then I wired the pickguard to the guitar.
I used heat-shrink tubes to wire the ground and the jack from the guitar to the pickguard.

Then I screwed the pickguard back to the guitar and put the new pot knobs (metal black ones for the look).

And.. TADAAA!! Tested it, working perfectly! With great sound. The little 59 keeps the nature of the Strat in clean, especially with a single coil split. It also works very well with a good distortion, with a sound more like a Les Paul.
The Duckbuckers is a good choice in the middle. Keep also the Strat spirit.