This is my old strat we're talking about, you know... Had it since I my sixteenth birthday, now sixteen years ago. Kept it stock for too long. The MIJ pickups are not excellent, which is mostly due to use of cheap magnets. My suggestion for any strat owner is: get decent pickups, but not too expensive. Just decent ones. US Strat pickups are better.

Before I replaced the pickups, as shielded the cavity and star gounded the guitar as explained on the fantastic Guitarnuts website and got additional wiring schemes from the related discussion board



In the first step I used 2 Fender Texas Special for the neck and mid positions, and a Robert Cray Custom shop neck pickup for the bridge position. I wired a pushpull pot to add the neck pickup in series to whatever is selected on the standard five way Fender switch.




If you ever have you back plate from your strat off, take the effor to rearrange the tremelo springs like this for more stability:



After some weeks I realised the RC Custom shop was too shrill and replaced it with a Seymour Duncan Little '59. I added to more pushpull.

volume pushpull : add neck in series
tone1 pushpull : switch humbucker to parallel
tone2 pushpull: reverse humbucket as a whole