Electric Guitar pickups Reviews

Poor small pink electric guitar! This American Vintage ’56 Stratocaster was torn open a half-dozen times.

The Fender Stratocaster is perhaps the preferred guitar of all time. Why have a lot of people changed the pickup design since the instrument’s 1954 first?

Many players—even Strat fans—have a love/hate relationship using the guitar’s pickups, and pickup modifications are almost because old once the design it self. The pickups at the beginning of models employed alnico 3 magnets, but louder, better alnico 5s became standard within a few years. Subsequent departures consist of higher-output bridge pickups for fatter, less shrill lead shades, hum-cancelling designs, and non-staggered magnets to allow for contemporary string preferences and slimmer neck radiuses.

Nevertheless, many players swear by the initial design, as well as this roundup, we went the ultra-vintage course. We asked participants to submit period-correct pickup sets based on these requirements:

• conventional products and framework.

• conventional quantity of winds.

• Alnico 5 magnets.

• Formvar-coated cable. (Formvar may be the resin movie that insulates the copper cable on conventional Strat pickups.)

• Staggered magnets—that is, magnets of assorted level pertaining to the strings, as entirely on vintage Strat pickups. (Whether staggered magnets tend to be desirable for modern players is a subject alone. Begin to see the “Is It more straightforward to Stagger or perhaps right” sidebar.)

Like much songs equipment from a half-century ago, old Strat pickups are just like snowflakes: No two tend to be precisely alike.

There is reallyn’t much to a Strat pickup: just coated copper wire, a bobbin to put it around, six small magnets, in addition to insulated cables that connect the pickup to your guitar’s circuitry. Yet there’s much space for variation within those slim parameters. Extra winds of wire create a hotter pickup. Degaussing (demagnetizing) the magnets yields a softer, smoother tone similar to a vintage pickup. Various grades of alnico yield various shades. Even two “strictly vintage” pickups can seem very different.

Players searching for classic Strat pickups have numerous choices—far above covered here! When selecting members, we picked companies maybe not represented in our last major pickup roundup, which included models from DiMarzio, Fralin, GFS, Gibson, Harmonic Designs, Lollar, and Seymour Duncan. These times, our lovely contestants come from Fender’s Custom store and four smaller organizations: Amalfitano, Klein, Manlius, and Mojotone.