Pickups for Vintage Hardtail Build?

[drysideshooter]

I have a Warmoth hardtail strat body enroute.  Maple/Maple neck with 10-16" compound radius and 1 11/16" nut enroute too.

The body is set up for the wide (.446") vintage spring spacing. I'm going to put a Hipshot hardtail bridge on it, the one without the sides that is set up for the correct string spacing. 

I play mostly blues and classic rock.  I'm trying to decide on pickups and would appreciate any advice.  With a relatively flat neck I'm wondering if some flat pole pickups like Seymour Duncan SSL-2's would be the way to go, or possibly SSL-2's at the neck and middle (middle RWRP) with a SSL-6 at the bridge?  The SSL-6 is also flat pole and might offer a little more versatility of sound. SSL-1's with the staggered poles are a consideration too, but I wonder if the flat pole's might be better to keep the d and g strings from being overpowering?  I've even thought about a set of the bargain priced Fender Tex-Mex's. 

Any thoughts or advice would be genuinely appreciated.

 

[TBurst Std]

Don't worry about your radius. They voice pickups and poles based upon the sound they are looking for.
IE:If you select option A or B and neither was voiced for the radius you are using, its pointless.
Just get what sounds good to you. Never heard of anyone being unsatisfied in 10+ years here because of a different radius.

 

[drysideshooter]

Thanks tburst.  Unfortunately I live in an area without much in the way of guitar shops, so my ability to try many different pickups is rather limited.  I'm willing to kind of go with a consensus opinion, realizing I may not like them, or they may not be the best for my particular guitar.  Mostly looking for ideas from those with experience with vintage hardtails and what they liked. 

I've also thought about the Fender Custom Shop Texas specials. Especially with 7 way switching to be able to have the neck on in all positions it seems like they may be really versatile?

 

[Cagey]

Pickup pole height staggering is for the guys who can hear a difference between a 1 1/4" and a 1 1/2" screw holding their strap hanger buttons on, or whether somebody's secretly swapped the Copper Tops for Energizers in their July serial number '74 Dunlop Cry Baby (which everybody who's anybody knows is the only wah that ever sounded even remotely good). Y'know. As a prank.

It's tough to recommend pickups. There are not only about eleventy-bajillion to choose from these days, how they sound is going to vary depending on what you mount them in, how they're set up, and how you play.

Not to despair; it's gotten to be difficult to go wrong with anything any more. "Bad" pickups almost don't exist, unless you're really scraping the very bottom of a Chinese barrel. Not to disparage China - a good many of their pickups are good, too. But, everybody has some stuff you wonder how they had the nerve to produce.

For a single coil application like a Strat, if you want an honest "Strat" sound, I'd recommend Bill Lawrence's Microcoils. They're effectively noiseless without any of the typical trickery that ends up compromising things. They're actually single coil pickups - no stacked coil, no dummy coil, no active electronics. Just Bill's magic.

Past that, I'd row through the selections at Guitar Fetish and see if anything perks you up. Don't let the price fool you - lotta real nice parts they offer. Only difference between a $30 GFS and a $90 Lollar is $60 and some flowery verbiage. The quality is still there.

 

[stratamania]

I would say recommending pickups is a long shot.

But there are pickups that are made for flatter or compound radius necks versus the traditional Strat pickups whose polepieces were made for 7 1/4" radius necks in the first place and never changed since then.

Some manufacturers such as Kinman, offer this as a choice when ordering from them.

So I do not agree totally with the statement about voicing of pickups. Polepiece placement is more to do with optimum positioning electrically which will have an effect on function in a similar way that adjusting pickup height has. People don't do that for tone, but more for balanced output. (Tonal difference here may be a byproduct)

The Seymour Duncans mentioned seem a good choice in any case.

 

[drysideshooter]

I appreciate the information.  I just recently started playing again after a long hiatus.  I (apparently wrongly) assumed the cheap pickups at places like guitarfetish were probably pretty bad.

I think I'm going to order a set of Fender Tex-Mex.  They're pretty inexpensive, and if nothing else will give me a point of reference if I decide they are lacking somewhere for me.  I know I can change the gauge of the d and g strings if needed to compensate a bit too.  I have no problem spending time on set up and adjusting things to get as close to what I'm looking for as I can.  Part of the fun. 

 

[stratamania]

Seems like a good plan.

 

[Zhaezzy]

    I don't have a lot of experience with single coil pickups on my builds. I have a set of DiMarzio Brian May pickups on my jazzmaster sss guitar great pickups but they are unicorns because they stopped making them close to twenty years ago. I do have some more recent experience with humbuckers though. The Dimarzio Humbucker from hell is the best neck humbucker I have tried. Lower output and more of a filtron wide range humbucker kind of tone out of them. . Dimarzio Norton is nice midrangy and a bit hot taps to an almost tele like snarl in the bridge position. Got a set of Joe Satriani model humbuckers in one guitar great with overdrive and gain but clean they are kind of blah.

 

[musicispeace]

I'm another guy who started playing again after a LONG time away and wow did I walk into a different, new world. But I remain really glad I went the partscaster route. As for pickups it is indeed hard to recommend for another person. I litterally spent three months off and on listening to online sound samples for my first build before deciding and even them I changed them after about six months. This time around I have become a strat player and mostly go for about vintage output passive pickups.

For what it is worth, I have liked Klein for vintage style strat pickups (lot of texture in my opinion) and I think Zhangbucker (David Plummer in LA) is a great winder also, particularly for something with a little more punch than vintage. Now I shopped those two when I was making better money and had no other pressing obligations financially. I am currently trying to get a strat done that will have a set of the Mojotone '58 Quiet Coils and am very interested in what they will be like. I have the Tone Specific Country-for-Tele in my tele (now under a differnt model name) and am very happy with them.

All that said, there are a wealth of pickup options for all budgets out there, which hopefully outweighs the feeling of waking up and finding like 2000 people making pickups when it was about 3 a couple decades ago. But you gotta find what makes YOU happy and that is the goal with pickups.

Lasty, I have given up on precise spacing on the pole piece to string question and am perfectly happy. If it sounds like an electric guitar and I like what is coming out the speakers I'm simply delighted. Magnets have fields and that works for me.