Tom Delonge's Strat has no tone knobs. All guitars have tuning machines, usually on the headstock. You can tune that guitar any way you want (basicly), where it limits you is you have one pickup and a volume knob- you can't change your sound around very much making the guitar a one trick pony. A standard Strat has three single coil pickups, allowing five pickup combonations. It also has two tone knobs, one for the neck pickup, one for the mid. How you get a standard Strat to sound close to a Les Paul is to select either the neck/mid position or the mid/bridge position and roll off the tone for the mid pickup about half way. This does two things: First, you're using two coils, aproxomating a humbucker sound. Second, you've muddied up the tone a little. You'll never get a Strat to sound totally like a Les Paul because the Les Paul is made out of different woods, has a short scale neck (makes the strings looser), and has a set neck. But you can make a Strat sound a lot closer to a Les Paul than you can make a Les Paul sound like a Strat.