needsmorecowbel wrote:I'm going to build a simple strat design with a Seymour Duncan Hotrails, and 2 Fender Noiseless pickups or some equivalent. Trying to find a nice piece of Myrtle to put on top of a piece of Queensland Maple...Is there a better pickup/ wood choice perhaps?
Pickups aren't maybe as important as the wood choice and that very much depends on what type of tone you want. If you want the typical thin, twangy (Technical term there

) sound that strats produce then the denser woods will give that. Alder and Ash were the original timbers used, the Jarrah you used would fall into this catagory, another good one would be any of the Rosewoods but would be cost prohibitive! Some good 'middle ground' woods are poplar/basswood (which are very light) I would say the Queensland maple you intend to use would be more than adequate too & would fall somewhere between the middle ground & thin sound, in NZ we have Southland Beech which I have used in the past and comes into this area too. If you wanted a more fuller 'Ballsier' (another technical term!) sound then the Mahoganies and similar 'open grained' woods would give you that fatter sound.
Different style pickups do give a characteristic sound but can be tweaked with knobs and buttons, the timber gives the base tone or voice to the guitar that can't be tweaked. Having said that, modern effects peddles can shape the output so much that even a thin sounding guitar can sound like a full noise Gibson through a Marshall stack...and vice versa.