Re: Why do so many people dislike vintage noiseless strat pups
I extended an invitation to prove I'm right and you made it personal.
You are hilarious.
Thank you for your gracious invitation to the lovely South Wales. Being that I am located some three-thousand-eight-hundred miles away on a different continent, I must decline. Perhaps another time.
The fact is, your guitars and in fact your gear, as amazing as it sounds, would make so much noise in some of the venues I play, that you'd be forced to cancel your gig.
I've never cancelled a gig over 60-cycle hum, but it sounds like you have some kind of regionally-specific super hum; the likes of which I've never had to face here in the United States. I'll have to defer to your experience here, I suppose.
The minute you turned up your volume knob, the noise would drown out the rest of the band.
That's not " opinion " that's a fact.
Some of the old workingmen's clubs, as they're known in the UK, have what is called 3 phase wiring.
This is now banned but as it's too expensive for the poorer clubs to upgrade, it's still present.
The stage could be on one phase one one side of the stage but the other side, the lights, bar equipment and everything else, could be on one or more others.
This is extremely dangerous and I have actually been electrocuted on stage once.
At its simplest, it induces noise way above what you're 60cycle hum sounds like.
Any single coil pickup would scream as soon as it's used.
So I reiterate, what's the point of amazing tone if noone can hear you ?
If you only play with a clean or lightly overdriven tone you'll get away with it but the second you need a high gain tone, look out.
That certainly sounds dreadful.
I would think that, if by some unseen twist of fate, I ever found myself working the rough-and-tumble gigging circuit of South Wales workingmen's clubs, replete with their 3-phase live-performer-electrocution systems, I might get some noiseless single coils or just use humbuckers - or at least be moved to do so after my first hum-related gig cancellation.
You see, here in America, the wiring isn't always perfect and the situation isn't always ideal, but most of the time single coils are OK. I don't always use them. I tend to go back and forth between them, in fact, but I do use them for high gain and I
do gig, so you assertion about bedroom players et al isn't wholly accurate on a macro scale.
Now, if you'd said "Here on the muddy banks of the Bristol Channel, where our pub taps are electrified and our toilets are filled with electric eels, you'll find only bedroom players would dare use single coil pickups for more than moderate distortion, lest the great 3-phase beast of perdition come tumbling down from the peaks of Pen y Fan and consume thee, body and soul!"
...we would never have had this argument.
