fender pickups?

[hatecrew]

hi all. i want to mod my fender mex strat. It's now HSS but i'm thinking of modding it to SSS to get the "vintage sound". Now, what pickups should i get? i'm thinking of a fender vintage noiseless set or lace sensors or fender texas specials. what pickups should i get if i want to nail a sound close to john frusciante's? and where can i get the fender pickups?

 

[Crawldaddy]

Hmm.

Perhaps you could point to us what you personally define as "vintage sound" with regards to strats because to some people, "vintage" could refer to 1950s all the way to 1980s. And obviously the 'desired' tones differ from each decade to the next.

And I personally feel (btw anyone can disagree with me) John Frusciante's tone is not exactly vintage. Then again MY point of view regarding "vintage strat sound" would be the Ritchie Blackmore, Hendrix or even Knopfler kind of strat tone.

Also you could perhaps read more of the reviews given on Harmony Central or Ultimate Guitar regarding how the various pickups perform. In any case do more research, and probably give us your price range.

I'm all eyes / ears.

 

[I_M_Ken]

from a personal view point having tried Lace Sensors, they dont give a vintage tone. too hot, too compressed sounding. so i'd say stay away from those if u want 'vintage' tones.

 

[edgie]

You can try fralin vintage hots. They're not really hot high output pickups, just 6k ohms for the neck and mids and 6.7 for the bridge. I think lower output pickups sound sweeter, are more versatile, and they enable you to maximize the use of your effects better than hi-output ones. They'll pretty much cover john frusciante's tone(with the correct rig of course) and then some.

I agree with crawldaddy's perception of vintage tone. Though I must add rory gallagher and clapton's tone in the blues album.

 

[seanydon]

I really love texas specials. My friend sold me a set at a pretty good price and I never looked back. While Tex-Mex sounds nice with overdrive, specials can go really clean and sound really defined still. Overdrive it and it sounds awesome too.

 

[Mobius]

One up for the texas specials, i have it in my strat. Sounds damn sweet and has that vintage vibe to it. But the clean is not really that clean in my opinion, but tat doesn't concern me

 

[fgl]

get fender vintage noiseless pup & an eric clapton gain boost set to boot.

Quiet, mai hum. gain boost gives you additional 25db of boost

I putting a set of the above mentioned on my Eric clapton blackie