Why do I need two Strats?

The single and the fat.

Here's an often asked question by the wife. So why do you NEED two Stratocasters? It's all about tone. It was simple back in '56. The Strat was born with three pickups, identical triplets you might say. Mellow, Bright and Twang or in the case of Strat guitar terms bright, brighter and brightest. This was the case for 40 years until some bright spark at Fender inverted the 'Fat' Strat by replacing the single coil bridge pickup (Twang) with a humbucker.
Tone as we knew it was turned on it's head and a radically different Strat was born, the fat brother. No doubt originally intended to replicate the bridge hummer of the Gibson Les Paul. Well it sorta did. Unfortunately, simply changing the single for a hummer while retaining the usual electronic values of the traditional Strat will decrease the resonant peak of the humbucker even further than when it's mated with Les Paul electronics. So one for the Mrs's of this world.. in actual fact you need two Strats plus a Les Paul for three completely different sounding instruments.

Here's a piece I lifted from the Seymour Duncan forum that explains the resonant peak thing..

When you use a humbucker with a 250k volume pot (like a stock Strat uses, instead of the usual 500k for HB equipped guitars), it warms up, lowers the resonant peak of the pickup, and lowers the output a bit. And when you use a guitar without a tone pot, the tone gets a lot brighter. Even on ten a tone pot bleeds some high end through the 500k resistance and .022 cap to ground. I personally think it's too bright and kind of glassy. So when Eddie (VH) found a humbucker equipped guitar with a 250k volume pot a bit dull, he made up for that by removing the tone pot... (do both and you've really screwed with the pickups usual tonal curve too), now add an EQ with a frown. Humbuckers traditionally come with 500k volume and tone pots, with .022 caps (Les Paul's). Single coils traditionally use 250k pots. Remember, pickups were voiced/made to run at these values, changing the value changes their intended tone (good or bad is an opinion), as well as their output. In this diagram the top curve indicates virtually no load, the second curve down indicates a 1meg pot, the third down is a 500k pot, the fourth is a 250k pot and the bottom curve represents a 100k pot. As you can see, higher pots give you more output and raise the resonant peaks output. The resonant peak doesn't shift in frequency, but it does shift in amplitude. The resonant peak frequency of most HBs is around 5k to 7k.

Facinating !!