Re: Early MiM Fenders.....
I kinda wanna keep this MiM's electronics and pickups all original. I'm not gonna say that the stock pickups are "amazing" or "better than so and so's pickups" because their not, they just sound good to me and i really don't have a reason to change them.
I recently parted out a 99 MiM strat recently that i had a set of SSL-1's in and while the pickups did sound really good, the guitar seems to limit them from doing what they are fully capable of. Things like sustain and resonance didn't seem to be there very much. So thats when i decided that compared to this stock MiM tele, the tele actually sounds better, resonated more, and has more sustain than the strat did with the SD pickups. So honestly, that strat is pretty much keeping me from wanting to swap out pickups now because i'm afraid that the pickups will be "too much" for the guitar.
Someone else mentioned "pre-aged" pickups earlier. In my esquire, i have a SD Broadcaster p/up in it thats supposed to have "Dun-Aged" pickup magnets. I don't really hear anything special about this pickup. Maybe i got a hold of one that just wasn't made as good as the others or what you call a "lemon". But I think my MiM's bridge pickup out does this one, IMHO. Looks really cool though. And through certain amps it does have a pretty good tone, but its just not "there" like the Standard's is.
FenderBender