Pickups
When I hot rodded my "Black Pearl" Squire strat I checked with the tech at Seymour Duncan and explained exactly the sounds I was trying to get at and he was really helpful and suggested a set up that I was already piecing together, that he said was popular with a lot of serious players.
Here's what I put in: I put a SD hot rail in the neck which sounds really great; a 'lil '59 in the middle; and a JB Jr in the bridge, a truly awesome pickup. All SD pups. I put a new switch in, high quality and had the tone knobs hooked up to the neck and the bridge and this is outstanding having control over that JB Jr in the bridge. The wide open middle pup sounds fantastic and the notch positions are really nice.
This is a super versatile set up and you can get all kinds of tones out of it and all the pups are noisless single coil humbuckers but they have a distinctly strat sound to them, quite unlile their full size humbucker counterparts. They are really great pickups and cost about sixty dollars each but you get what you pay for with these. This Squire guitar is awesome, really awesome. As a visual plus it has a highly flammed maple neck all the way up thru the headstock, every quarter inch is a flame line. It is an '04 model and is naturally relic'd, very minorly. Black with a black pearl pickguard and black pups, plus Fender locking tuners. The guitar plays and sounds and looks probably as well as any of my guitars, including some eight hundred plus ones.
The more I play the more I find out that there is more to tone than price paid; although in general my more expensive guitars sound significantly better than my inexpensive SX'es and so on, but not always, and definitely not after you do some successful modding to some of the less expensive guitars.
Duffy
Winfield, Pa.
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