So I have a 93/94 40th anniversary strat. Nice solid piece and plays well. I want to get new pickups installed and I am confused on which to buy. I want it to be a Screaning Blues Guitar!!! Of coarse there are the Texas Specials but what about the Fat 50's, The 69' Set, The 54' Set, Original 57/62 Set, Noiseless and the 55 Split Coil. There are plenty to choose from but Im looking for the best Blues tone. Will eventually spend $150 so Im looking to only do this one time. Thanks for the peek and any posted help!

The pickups are only a piece of the tone...a bigger part is the amp,what amp do you play through now?

I am currently playing through a Marshall BluesBreaker which does have excellent tone. i just want to add to it with some quality pickups. Thanks.

I've owned two Strats with the 57/62 pups,they sound really good and I'm a blues player also,but what I like might not fit for you as well,there will be others who will suggest different pickups....but keep in mind that tone is subjective,that's what we always agree on around here it seems.
Good luck!

A Bluesbreaker? Wow.....that's alot of amp (with a price tag to match). It doesn't have a preamp either if I'm not mistaken so you have to really crank it to get any distortion out of it and at those volumes....well I'll just say that I couldn't take it for very long. Of course you can always use a pedal and play at a lower volume to get some distortion without playing at ear splitting volumes. They're certainly great amps though.

About the pickups, it's all really subjective and all any of us can really do is give our opinions on the pickups that we've used. Texas Specials are VERY popular but I found them to be too hot for my liking. I like the Tex-mex pickups more but didn't like them enough to keep them in my Road Worn '50's Strat. I replaced them with Duncan Antiquity '50's pickups which I really like but they're a bit outside your price range if you only wanna spend $150. My #1 guitar is an AVRI '57 Strat which of course has the stock '57/'62 pickups which I also really like, and I have a Custom Shop '56 Time Machine Strat which, according to the specs, has "Custom '50's pickups". I suspect these may be the Custom '54's but they're nice whatever they are.

Thanks for the reply Reb, Yes I think I tried a Strat out at a store that had the 57/62's and they sounded awesome. I did have it cranked through a Twin at the time as well. Yes I do love my Marshall BB and you do have to go to 11 to get the dirt out of it. But believe it or not its not a huge volume jump from 4 to 10. I often think about having a master volume mod put in but scared to death to have any one touch it. I just use a boutique classic overdrive pedal for now.

It has two 12AX7s which are the preamp plus a third 12AX7 as the phase inverter. It doesn't have a master volume.

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Bill

DiMarzio Virtual Vintage Blues/Heavy Blues 2......Gives you all the features of the 'Area' series pickups with more mids and bass, and they are hum cancelling.

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"Another day in paradise!"

Yeah, every guitar amp has a preamp, or it wouldn't work, but it if you've always used a master volume, it can seem like there isn't one.

as for getting it modified with a master volume absolutely be p put in. As a mature of fact, I built a clone of a fender Deluxe, the original Deluxe (no reverb). I did deviate from the original design in a couple ways, the main mod being a Master volume with a push/ pull. When you pull out the MV pot, it totally bypasses the circuit, making it a non MV. It was a little difficult because I couldn't find an existing schematic of a Fender Deluxe with it. I had to use the available schematic from a Mesa Boogie Trans Atlantic, andI used that to figure out how to do it. The amp is definitely louder with the MV bypassed than it is with the master and gain dimed.

As for pickups, what's best for blues is an impossible question to answer. I agree with the other post that the amp will have a bigger influence than the pickups. Also, what type of blues will influence which pickup works for best. Texas Specials are wound and voiced for a more output, and with more midrange. They're meant to give the Texas blues sound, known best for SRV & Billy Gibson, but especially for STV, at least for strat players, and T. Specials are voiced for his tone, which I find ironic because when they finally studies his pickups, they found them to be underwound.
I've owned Texas Specials, and really liked them, but for my purpose I needed noiseless. The shop I work at exclusively carried Lindy Fralin's. I liked the Fralin pure blues more than texas specials, but they're considerably more $$, and I'm bot sure if the pickup warrents the price difference.

I went through several different pickup brands (a definite perk that comes from working at a guitar repair shop. After the countless noiseless (all stacked humbuckers, I didn't use or want twin rails). From regular Fender Vintafe noiseless, SCNs, toboutique Fralin (which makes all my humbuckers, all Pure PAFs with varying putputs) and Lollars. In the end though, the best ones IMO turned out to be the Dimarzio Area 58/58/61's. They're quieter than my regular humbuckers , sound and respond to pick attack and dynamics extremely well. Which impressed me was that I find most 'noiseless singlcoils' that are called vintage, may sound vintage, but don't respont in the same way a good vintage pickup should.

My main strat has Area 58/58/61, N/M/B. My other has Dimarzio Pro '54/Area 61/Heavy Blues 2. Thr Pro 54 & H. Blues are Area pickups, though they don't refer to them as such. But they both use Alnico II, and use the same winding 9rocess the same way they do the Area pickups. They all started out as the Virtual Vintage line. I love them, and recommend them to customers, and have heard nothing but positive responses from them after they played with them.

I'm not that knowledgeable about the way amps work. I started to say it didn't have a master volume in my post but thought that the absence of a master volume meant that there was no preamp.

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Still looking for that One Guitar To Rule Them All since 1964...
FSR Fender 60 Anniversary Strat HSS MIM, Gibson ES 335, Taylor 555, Ovation Custom Balladeer-12, Baby Taylor, Fender Princeton Chorus (stereo), Fender Champ 600

Well, since FMIC saw fit to put an end to the '57 Deluxe I guess the only Fender made option is the new EC Tremolux:

http://www.fender.com/en-CA/products/clapton/models.php?prodNo=8151500

However for significantly less money than the Tremo you can have a faithfull recreation of the real deal.

http://www.victoriaamp.com/amps.html?model=20112

I played one of these recently and it was the first piece of gear in years to give me an honest to goodness full blown case of GAS. I'll be getting one of these things in the future. It's just a question of when. I have other things on my plate right now but that won't be forever. If you look around you can find them for about $1,000 - $1,200.

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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.

They built a Buddy Guy model too. You can't keep up with these guys. He debuted that Clapton amp in Corona, too. We have GAS, they get the checks.

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"Another day in paradise!"

BMW-KTM - just wanted to say that I love the poppy in your signature!

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Custom Shop '59 Stratocaster
AV Hot Rod '52 Telecaster
AV '56 Stratocaster
'65 Deluxe Reverb Reissue

You should see his garden.

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"Another day in paradise!"