Need help! Fender strat (Mexican) pickup questions

[poulsensmusic]

Hi everyone! Doing my first pick up swap and right now I have
Stock ceramic pick ups in my guitar. I want to add some new pick ups that will
Benefit me more for the style of playing I enjoy. Which is heavier rock and rol some metal
The occasional softer rock stuff. I almost always have some light distortion on.
I'm really new at this but this is kind of my idea

Neck-ssl-4 quarter pound
Middle- ssl-4 rwrp quarter pound
Bridge- ssl-7 quarter pound

Will this work or will this sound like garbage. Also I'm having a hard time
Understanding how exactly pick ups work with one another.
I hear of people having a different type of pick up in each
Position on their guitar and some people are opting for al of the samee
Pick ups in all three positions. I had one guy say it's a bad idea to opt for different
Pickups in all three positions because it messes with string response.
I just need to know what I can and cannot do and have work.
Do I have to do a "set" like all the same pick up In all three positions or can
I customize???

Thanks guys I appreciate it!

 

[daenius]

Re: Need help! Fender strat (Mexican) pickup questions

Only YOUR ears can tell you if a set of pickups "work" with each other: ultimately it's your sound and what you want that matters.

I would say a great place to start is look at the kind of music you'd like to play, perhaps look up your favorite artists and see what they're using, and try something similar.

Looks like you're going for the quarter pound set! I've played guitars with that set before, absolutely fantastic sound! Pretty good for hard rock and fantastic for heavier blues, the pickups are much fatter and warmer sounding than traditional single coils, but still have that single coil brightness.

As to "all the same pickup in all 3 positions" - NO! While this is subjective, most of the time most people would NOT want that at all! You will typically find the bridge pickup to be higher output and slightly warmer than the neck pickup, and the middle pickup is somewhere between the 2. Reason for this is that your strings naturally vibrate much more close to the neck than the bridge. This means naturally, there is much less physical vibration near the bridge, and the tone of the strings there also tends to be thinner. This is why bridge pickups tend to be higher output and a bit warmer to compensate for that. The neck pickup is positioned where the string vibrates very freely with very warm tone, so naturally, it vibrates much more, and so you do not need as much output from your pickup to pickup the sound. If you actually installed the same exact pickup in all 3 positions and all set to the same height, you'll find the neck pickup to be MUCH louder than the bridge pickup.

 

[PFDarkside]

Re: Need help! Fender strat (Mexican) pickup questions

Completely up to you! Like you mentioned, some like their guitar to sound very consistent from bridge through neck, with all positions being the same relative output just getting brighter as you get to the bridge. Others indeed want two or more distinct tones. For example, 3 SSL-1s can be used to get a vintage Strat tone in every position. Or you could use 2 SSL-1s and a humbucker to get both vintage Strat tones and a rock humbucker bridge tone. The epitome is something like the everything axe set. A hot bridge, mid output neck and vintage middle for three unique tones.

Your example with the Quarter Pounds would work well if you like the QP tone. Rounder tones at the neck, sharper tones at the bridge and if you balance the heights you should get pretty even output in each position.