Hello all! I'm entertaining the idea of replacing my stock pickups in my MIM HSS Stratocaster, for Christmas. Mine sound fine but rumor has it that new pickups give a guitar more "growl." Is this true or are the changes barely noticeable? What exactly are the changes? What are some of the best choices? For an HSS, are there packages with humbucker, single, single parts? I only see packages with single coil pickups. I'm just asking about pickups period, I guess. Any and all help is much appreciated!

No doubt, changing your pickups will change your sound. But the question here is; what are you trying to achieve? Is there anything about the sound of your stock pickups that you don't like? I've seen many posts about people replacing their stock MIM pickups with something "better" (note the quotation marks), but a lot of people are quite satisfied with them as they are. So the question remains; what do you want to get out of the guitar?

Most folks will say that you should play your guitar without mods for around 6 months before making any drastic changes. I don't know how experienced you are as a Strat player so I say hold onto making any changes until you know exactly what you are looking for. I bought my first Strat in '98 and finally decided to try some new pickups in about 2010. I was looking for more of a SRV sound and found a pickup maker (Jeff Chevalier) that could really provide an outstanding pickup for a great price. Since then I've purchased a fully loaded pickguard from http://www.chevalierpickups.com/ (his '67 Hendrix style set) to switch out as I feel in my '08 Deluxe Strat. In short, make sure your guitar is properly set up ,it is a very fine instrument with nice pickups, and play it for a good while before you make some modifications. You can play around with pickup height and amp settings to try to dial up a tone you like. If after several months you still aren't happy with it then decide what sound you want. There's tons of pickup choices to choose from so you need to really know what you are going after before you start pulling the trigger on pickup changes.

Russ

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'08 Amer. Dlx. Strat, '98 Amer. Std. Strat, '10 Squire CV Tele Custom, '96 Seagull S+6 Cedar
Deluxe Reverb RI, Tweed Blues Jr., Champion 110, Champion 600, Mustang I, Line 6 Vetta

I agree you should keep it like it is for a while longer. You need to become very intimate with the sound and feel of your pickups before you decide to change them. By feel of pickups I mean the way they respond to your touch of the strings ... both hands ... how they behave when you change your level of attack, your aggressiveness, your whisper or your scream as well as how to best tweak your amp to get the sounds you like. Until you become intimately aquainted with your pickups you won't really know what they are capable of or of what you are capable of making them sound like.

Don't do what a lot of new people do and spend most of their time reading about what new product works best. Spend most of your time playing what you have and figure out how to make it sound the best you can make it can sound.

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Just think of how awesome a guitar player you could have been by now if you had only spent the last 10 years practicing instead of obsessing over pickups and roasted maple necks.

+1

Arjay

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"Here's why reliability is job one: A great sounding amp that breaks down goes from being a favorite piece of gear to a useless piece of crap in less time than it takes to read this sentence." -- BRUCE ZINKY

Great! Thanks guys. Yea, I just got my guitar 2 months ago. My FIRST guitar, at that. I'll take your advice, and try to attain that nasty, mean bluesy sound with what I have.

Then put a lot of thought into the amp choice.

Wait... What kind can I put on a HSS? I only seem to find single coils.

+ about a hundred

Before you go spending tons of money on pickups and not being happy and then trying more and more and more and still searching, spend some time and thought and money on a good amp. It's the amp that makes the sound you hear. Other factors like guitar choice, pickup choice, etc will all have an impact on your sound and they all have pros and cons and can all be made to sound good but it's the amp that will have the greatest impact on your own satisfaction with your tone. Too many people spend money on guitars and then cheap out on their amps when it should be the other way around. You will always sound better playing a $300 guitar through a $3,000 amp than you will playing a $3,000 guitar through a $300 amp.

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Just think of how awesome a guitar player you could have been by now if you had only spent the last 10 years practicing instead of obsessing over pickups and roasted maple necks.