Favorite Strat Pickups?

[copperheadroads]

At the moment .something from the late 50's
Heavy build 42 gauge formvar wire & a tad under 8000 turns for the neck,a little more for the middle & 8500 turns or a little more for the bridge .

[jack briggs]

Same here.

Same here.

yes and yes


cheers,

[big_teee]

Strat Single Coils can really sound good, but Just one of my favorite Strat Pickups.
Actually my favorite Strat Pickup Isn't a SC, it is a Blade or Rail Pickup.
If wound properly, you can get some of the same Strat Mojo with Rails, that you can get with SCs!
Minus the Noise, and Hum!
What is your experience?
T

[Kindly Killer]

Don't know whether I should chime in because one of my favorite neck pickups in a strat isn't even one I made - it's a Guitar Fetish blade pickup [I think "Lil Killer"?]. Had it in a junk drawer [taken out of a guitar] and put it in my own build as a placeholder. I ended up loving it. With a small cap across the pickup it has GREAT vocal quality for melody (e.g. jazz). Lift the cap and it's stratty enough, even in the all-important #4 position.

I like the effect blades have on the attack; that strat attack is great for hard, rhythmic parts, but it's unwieldy for other things without some kind of compression [e.g. saturated amp, compressor pedal], which takes away a lot of what I put into the music. Also a zinc block on that guitar a la Tyler, which seems to help with the attack and retain more mids.

This blade pickup has no string balance issue. On that guitar I also have a tapped bridge pickup with A2 mags and a ridiculous amount of wire on the full coil for midrange feast, but #2 position is ultra-glassy with the inner tap. That guitar is the one I grab if I'm subbing and I don't know quite what I'm walking into - it can do anything pretty well, some things great. It's an R&B MACHINE, which is what I play regularly.

I plan to make my own version using Mojo parts someday, but the little POS GFS pickup is good enough that it never seems to get up to the top of the list of priorities.

One thing that will probably get done before that is use the dual blade strat form to make an Alumitone style low-turns-into-transformer type pickup. I LOVE Alumitones but can't get them to work in any 25.5" scale guitar - the first string is too weak no matter what I do. Sounds like whining but keep in mind that I play melody a lot, which is a completely different ballgame from any kind of blues, rock, or strumming - the touch is much much lighter for what I do most of the time. Also my instruments are homemade and I hack away at them until they are effortless to play; anything that takes my mind out of the music and focuses attention on the instrument (e.g. "Oh yeah I have to play harder on the first string..") is a failure.

Anyway, in summary - I'm with Terry on blades in a strat. It's a real problem-solver.

And to add to the thread: in my beater strat that I take to a jam where I play in the host band (i.e. disposable LOL) I made the coils staggered - tall neck, normal middle, squat bridge. That guitar gets mixable, musical sounds very easily.

[big_teee]

On the blade shape, I noticed the same.
I tried the curved blades, and they were too Middy, and gave too much to the B and G strings, and the lil E was weak.
So I make my blades straight with a little roundness on the ends.
I do make my SCs Staggered, but a very mild stagger.
The only thing with the blades in a Strat, you can get a little of the quack, but not the quack you get with regular Single Coils, in position 2 & 4.
Great Discussion!
T