Thanks all for pitching in! I appreciate it.
The pedal link was interesting. I auditioned them all and liked the Hotone Omni the best but I have a lot of tweaks I can do in Garageband so I don't want to add any gadgets preferring to keep things simple. I'm still in deep regret having bought a Line6 Pocket Pod amp simulator with a nightmare UI I never bothered to master. Seems all the pedals listed made a point of making a strumming electric sound close, but I play with nails and hardly ever strum. Surprisingly, one even featured a "piezo" setting which even my poor ears can detect and loathe.
Last week I auditioned a few semi- and hollow-bodied electrics which made me appreciate my Strat even more. My Stat balances perfectly on my lap with the top at likely the same exact angle as my OO hollow-bodies. On both, my right hand fingers fall on the strings at almost the same angle so I don't have to "adjust" switching between the strat and OO. Even better, the bridge string spacing of both OO's and Strat are the exact same. I have managed to set up the action similar to my acoustics, I haven't raised the action at the bridge yet, but that's next on the list of things to try. The nut is narrower on the Strat but when playing capo'ed up the neck that hardly matters. So the Strat is non-negotiable.
jonfields45 - you're living my dream that I never did manage to have happen. Gigging as a duo looks like a lot of fun and congrats on that as well as your website. Clearly the electric has got to be plugged into something, but since I'm not gigging and live in a condo I have to stick with the smaller boxes. Also I've found GarageBand to be very glitchy as far as using it's amps directly from my USB box. I have had puzzling glitches for years with GB, so a better solution is to simply put a mic on the Blackstar Fly amp I have. It's a very easy simple solution I wished I'd hit on earlier.
I appreciate the suggestion of lowering the middle pickup and this is kind of what I'm interested in hearing more about. Getting a "rock" Strat tone has always baffled me, but for my purposes now, I end up playing clean which is fine. With the 5 way switch and tone knobs I can adjust what I need to hear depending on how high up my capo is.
The specific issue I'm trying to address is to somehow get the same type of attack, note decay and resonance from the Strat that my acoustics have. I've already discovered that playing with volume knob down to 3 will reduce the sustain, so perhaps lowering the pickups, weakening their signal, will reduce the sustain as well.
Thanks again to all!
