Dan just got his brand new American Standard Fender Stratocaster, in Olympic White, no less! Of course, this called for a celebration, so we met up at Big Fat Ostrich Guitar Labs to road test it.

And take it apart.

And change the pickups.

With a glass of Campari in one hand.

And a red hot soldering iron in the other.

Yeah, life’s dangerous.

Here’s the strat.

It’s such a beautiful guitar, that we just had to take it apart. Dan had already devised a plan and ordered a set of D. Allen 69 Voodoo pickups. All we had to was remove the stock pickups and start soldering. Actually you gotta solder to first and THEN remove the pickups. But you knew what I meant, didn’t you?

Now, normally you’d remove the strings and unscrew the pickguard before starting. We were lazy and actually just loosened the strings until they were slack. Then we unscrewed the pickguard and flipped it over for the operation. It’s do-able, and we did it.

Check out that clean wiring job. It’s even got that inside of a brand new guitar smell:

It’s a pretty simple circuit. In fact, we discussed this while taking a break over a glass of sweet sweet Campari after unscrewing that pickguard and loosening the strings. The circuit and volume and tone pots haven’t changed much since they were invented and it’s fascinating just how pleasing and enduring the shape of a Stratocaster is. Just like the Telecaster, they got that sexy shape right very early on.

Ok ok. Less talk, more soldering. Here’s what our signature soldering joints look like:

1 pickup in, 2 more to go! And no, we are not leaving an extra pickup in there:

And just like that, it’s done. Look at those joints:

And that’s it! We’ll be back with some sound clips because you can’t hear shit from just looking at the pics.