I am a proud owner of a '97 Texas Special American Fender Stratocaster. I bought this guitar brand new in 2000 in Frankfurt, Germany, and it was my first ever Stratocaster. My first serious guitar, actually. Given that I was 18 at the time, a school kid with no money, I was the happiest kid on a Earth when my parents decided to buy me one after hours and hours of urging and educating them about the great Fender Stratocaster and all the great players associated with it.

Years and years of hard practice made this guitar part of my body and I swore I'd never sell it. After all, you don't get two first guitars who you learn to love and respect just as you would with a human being.

INFLUENCES 

My first musical non-guitar-related influence was Aerosmith. I say non-guitar because at the time I had discovered Aerosmith I had neither played guitar nor have I had a clue I'd someday play one. Shortly after I learned some guitar basics (chords etc.) my drummer's father, who was an old and experienced rock drummer directed me to blues, Eric Clapton specifically. For that I will thank him for the rest of my life.

My affinity towards Aerosmith-like hard rock humbucking sound was something elusive with my Strat for obvious reasons. Single coil pickups, especially Texas special ones, were not designed to sound like PAF Pros or Burstbuckers, but I desperately wanted something more out of my guitar. The idea of replacing my single coil bridge pickup with a humbucker was years old to me. At first it seemed like sacrilege, but through time my inhibitions broke down. 


CONSIDERATION 

About a year ago I seriously started thinking about changing my Strat's Texas Special bridge pickup with a humbucker. There was a whole bunch of reasons both pro et contra. Evidently, I did it, and to make a long story short, I regretted it.

The first option I gave some thought to was installing a proper, normally-sized humbucker. Not after much thinking i discarded it because it needed body boring. After I discovered single coil-sized humbuckers the story became much less painful. A simple pickup switching was far less expensive than buying a Les Paul or some other valuable guitar. I say valuable because I've always thought that buying low or mid-class instruments was ineffective for a number of reasons. The main reason is wanting a better model, e.g. buying a Les Paul Standard and wanting a Custom shop V.O.S. or a Reissue.

Still being a minor expense compared to buying a '59 Les Paul Reissue, I decided to invest in the pickup. 


PICKUP SELECTION 

Without examining competition, I chose Seymour Duncan. DiMarzio or other companies may have had comparable or even better products, but I simply wasn't interested in other than SD. So I started off with pickup selection. The SD's pickup demo webpage was pretty good in concept, but it lacked options like different amps, cabinets, guitars, microphones, all of which can make a huge tonal difference. One pickup sounds totally different on two different guitars, or on the same guitar with different necks, let alone amps or microphones.

After hours of listening and weighing I finally chose the pickup. It was the Hot Rails For Strat. Right after my tech installed it I went to the gig without rehearsing the guitar. The moment I plugged it in the amp I felt a warm, dense, half-humbucker, half-single coil sound in the first position (bridge). It wasn't as humbuckerish as I wanted it to be, but it was close enough. It was a good, usable, thick, darkish, hard rock sound compared to a bright, twangy single Texas Special in the same position.

The disappointment came when I switched the sound to my all time favorite Strat pickup position - the second one (bridge and middle pickup together). Because of the new humbucker-single combination my most favorite sound suddenly became unavailable. My guitar became unable to produce the characteristic sound of Sweet Home Alabama, Lay Down Sally, and numerous other country songs, to mention a few. Even when I split the Hot Rails and used one half of the pickup in combination with my middle Texas Special, the beloved sound was gone. 


BACK TO TEXAS SPECIAL 

Although the Hot Rails has a sound that's more than usable, the guitar now lacks the characteristic second position Strat sound. There are some guitarists who can live with this fact, as well as those who find that the benefits of the humbucker go beyond losing the second position, but given this is a Fender Stratocaster it is simply a waste to lose a perfect and unique sound of the second position at the expense of a non-characteristic and non-unique, but still fatter-than-texas-special and a top notch pickup sound.

After a year or so on my guitar I've finally decided that the Hot Rails era has ended and that time has come to switch back to the Texas Special. The deciding moment was buying a Crybaby Classic wah (with the Fasel inductor), which is by design a bit darker than a standard Crybaby. When I plugged my guitar in I thought I had made a terrible wah selection because the treble point on the Crybaby (toe down) with Hot Rails on was not even close to the treble spectrum needed for normal wah operation. Instead of a "wiki" I got a "waka" at best. And then one day my friend brought his Stevie Ray Vaughan Signature Strat, which also has Texas Specials and is a bit brighter than my Strat due to rosewood neck, and when I tried the Crybaby with the SRV it said "wiki" as it's supposed to. The Crybaby was limited solely because of the Hot Rails pickup, not because someone designed it that way. Jimi Hendrix's Voodoo Chile was impossible to genuinely cover with the Hot Rails in the bridge position.


BUY YOURSELF A LES PAUL 

Along with my Strat I've had an Ibanez Joe Satriani JS1200CA since 2007. I haven't played it much not because it is a bad guitar but because I haven't managed to befriend a guitar with a floating tremolo. I use a lot of double stops and string bending of various sorts, some of which are impossible on a JS, but more than welcome on a hardtail Strat or Les Paul.

Instead of picking through a perfectly good guitar trying to make it sound more like a Les Paul (which really was my intention) I should have bought a proper Les Paul. No matter what pickup you buy and where you put it on a Strat, it may sound fatter than single coils, but it will never sound like a Les Paul, and vice versa.