Hi everyone, I'm new here, and I have a question that I hope some of you can help me out with. I just picked up an HSS mim strat, and immediately decided that the electronics had to go. I picked up a used set of pickups on another forum that were pulled out of the CS 60's strat. Fender calls them "vintage single-coil strat" pickups. Now I'm pretty certain that they're just basic alnico pickups, but I was just wondering if you guys had any opinions on them. They can't be worse than the lifeless stock ceramics, and the price was right, so I'm not at a huge loss if they're not what I want.

Welcome.

You've pretty much summed it up with these pickups, "...just basic alnico pickups...". It is quite easy to call such designs pretty much anything one likes just like Fender did, using a broad, generic and ambiguous name/description, created by modern manufacturing technique. As a matter of fact, I wouldn't be all that surprised if they were the exact same thing as your OEMs with the only difference being the alnico slugs vs. the ceramic bars.

As always, this is merely IMO where YMMV.

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