Without a doubt there's already a thread for this, so I wont be surprised if you post a tonne of links here for that thread. That aside, I just thought I could get a general guitar discussion as well.

Now guitar wise, I am a poor man and am so money wise. I only have one guitar to my name and it's an awful Fender Stratocaster from who knows how many years ago. It sounds pathetic, and I really wish I could make it sound metal. I can't afford a new guitar, but I'm sure I can afford new parts and pieces to do her up. I'd just like to hear peoples opinions on 'what do'. It gets complicated when it turns into questions like 'how do you want it to sound' and 'what do you want to play'. I have no idea what will make what sound like what, so that I guess is why I'm leaving it to you. I don't want to play tech death Faceless/Necrophagist style, but I wouldn't mind to be able produce a good tone doing so. I just need her to sound less muddy, and this probably goes down to the pickups. I need to hear opinions on pickups and how they will make her sound. I don't specifically care what genre they would cover etc, just give me a name, a description and a what do. Pickups is the main thing I'm interested in, but if you have any other ideas I'd love to hear them and discuss pimping up my gear.

What kind of amp are you using? If you're guitars tone isn't where you would like it to be it could have a lot to do with the amp you're plugged into.

If it's an actual Fender Stratocaster, then sell it and use the money to buy a new guitar. If it's an inexpensive knockoff, then you can go to places like www.guitarpartsonline.com and www.guitarfetish.com and get pickguards already loaded with new pickups, including a humbucker at the bridge position.

If it's a real Fender Strat, you don't need a new guitar. They are already awesome. What you probably need is a new amp dude, as brennan said. What are you playing through now?

Fender's most inexpensive strats under the Fender name, the "Made In Mexico" ones, are solid guitars. The single-coil models aren't the best suited for metal, but the ones with a humbucker at the bridge (HSS and HH) are pretty versatile.

Before you modify your guitar, in terms of playability, are you familiar with properly setting up the guitar - intonation and adjusting action?

Next, what amp do you have? Your amp, especially how you set it, is a huge factor in tone. It took me a long time to learn how to work with different guitars and amps to get make the knobs do what I wanted them to do with the sound I had.

As most people said earlier, if the guitar wood and everything is good, keep it... However, it might be alder fretboard instead of rosewood, and that for me personally is a real turn off. The laquer makes it nearly impossible to do vibratos from my experience...
But if you like it, keep it

But still, fix a humbucker for the bridge position. That has already been said, but do it. You simply can't have a good metal tone with a singlecoil.


And amp-wise, if you have a shitty amp, get either an older red stripe Peavey Bandit 112 or one like I'm using:
Peavey Vypyr 75!!! I can't imagine any amp in the world sounding better than this one in the price range. And I've tested out
really expensive mesa boogies, marschall, blabla tube amps, and surprisingly enough the Vypyr 75 blows them all!!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4a07L1GsxQ
This is something I recorded with it, and well I only mixed it for about a day, so the overall sound is pretty thin but you can get one of the best sounding distortion sounds out of this one.
And I got it for $200 only. Nothing can beat that!!!

Okay haha... I might be exaggerating a bit, but get it anyway.