^ The Slider range of pickups are made here in Australia I believe ? There are so many small pickup winding concerns now, and so many good and great ones. Overall, I think any decent-sounding Strat pickup that has been scatterwound will give the desired Strat sounds but with the difficult-to-define qualities that i refer to as 'the third dimension'.
But ultimately it's about what makes the player happy, because a happy player is surely going to be more deeply invested in what they're doing, and so probably doing it better. I have one or two really nice guitars that don't get played much, as i always seem to gravitate to a couple of old, beat-up hunks of junk because of sentimental value. Because they're old, there's something about the response of the wood, and the scatterwound pickups just seem to love bringing out those qualities to the amp and speakers. Because they've been with me for a very long time, they're like diaries of a big part of my life to some degree.
And in that light, perhaps regular production pickups make the old guitars like photograph albums, whereas the scatterwound pickups make them more like reminiscing about those old times with the actual people who were involved. But once we're talking about guitars that have been a part of our lives for years and even decades, some of the logic and sensibilities may get overtaken by sentiment, and i feel there's nothing wrong with that, in fact i think it's something to celebrate.
On the subject of simplicity (relating here to having the Old Dear rewired back to a simple form), I've long felt that sonic purity gets compromised as the circuitry becomes more complex in almost any sonic electronics. Back in the '70s i tried many of the then new-fangled wiring setups with added switches and controls, but to my mind, they almost always seemed to take a little something away from the core qualities of the basic configuration.
Hehe, here's a little story to illustrate the point in some way ...
Years ago I went to visit an old friend up in NSW. He had an old '60s valve PA amp in a metal cage, maybe 15 watts at most. He had played guitar through it, but it hadn't been very successful. It had it's circuit diagram glued inside it's baseplate. We sat down one night and i started removing components, and every step of the way, we'd fire it up and listen. As the evening progressed, the pile of removed components grew bigger, and there was less and less remaining inside the amp, which just sounded better and better as i removed parts. Eventually it got to a stage where i had to say "That's it .... if i remove one more part, the amp won't work at all". At that stage, the amp was sounding fantastic for guitar, and my friend was amazed that the more we took out, the better it got (there were way more parts on the table than there were in the chasis at that point).
It was a fun and very funny night, but it was also very illuminating in terms of the 'simple is good' mantra.
