So for the last years I’ve been rocking an Fender Jeff Beck Strat. Amazing guitar but it did not sound straty/quacky enough in my mind. I suspected this had to do with the Fender Noiseless pickups. They are stacked singlecoils. Low noise yes but they lack the snappy sound of real singles. I decided to change them out. After talking to the guys at Vintage Gitar in Oslo, I decided to go with the Lollar Dirty Blackface pickup set. Lollar makes four different types of strat pickups, named Tweed, Blonde, Blackface and Special.The Tweed being the one with lowest output. The Blackface has Alnico 5 magnets and are based on the 60`s area pickups. The Special is the one with highest output, more like an Texas Special from Fender. The Dirty Blackface set has Blackface neck and middle pickup combined with an Special Bridge pickup.

I ripped out the original pickups and installed the Lollars late friday night. After some adjustments I was ready to go. Imminently the guitar came to life. Sounding like a Strat is supposed to sound. The slightly overwound bridge pickup makes it easy to mach in level with the neck pickup. It is also slightly darker sounding. No need to roll down the tone control anymore. With the stock pickups I had to roll down to 7 on the tone pot using the bridge pickup.

Today I had some spare time, so I decided to make a video demoing the sounds.