Classic player, modern sounds!

 Here is a Fender Mex 50's classic player strat that was recently brought to me. It's a very nice strat with a comfortable neck and nice features. It looks and plays nice, but what about its tone? 
 The classic American Vintage Strat® Single-Coil Pickups are fine for clean tones and blues stuff but when you turn the OD channel On, the hum is just annoying... One could say that there are various hum-free single coils out there, but they are a bit expensive and they usually lack in output. A modern guitar player needs a bit more gain and output, at least for the bridge position pickup. 
 The solution is to put a humbucker at the bridge position to make it more like a "US" strat. "But wait a minute; I don't want to  replace the pickguard or even worse: root my guitar ! And if I don't like the outcome? Should I really spent 50-80euros for a 'bucker?" 
 The answer is, "No!", you shouldn't alter your guitar to match the pickups and spend tens of euros for something you might not like. You could just purchase a nice "dual rail" humbucker in singlecoil size via ebay for about 8euros (!!!) and try it on your guitar. 
  "8 euros? Is this a joke?" No it's not! I have bought 6 of these Chinese "rail" pickups that come with 4 wires(for coil tapping, series/parallel wiring e.t.c.).  I have installed them in most of my strats and they sound great for blues , rock and even metal stuff.  With a push/pull coil tap pot, they sound pretty good on the clean channel too! It's just phenomenal what you can buy with only 8 euros nowadays. 
 So give it a try and you 'll see for yourself, there's almost no risk!

Here is the modified cp 50s strat:

and here are the rail pickups I use:

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