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A pal of mine from our guitar club installed one of these on a strat and I used it the other day and was well impressed with the sound , but first let me explain how an humbucker gets to sound strat like !

Basically this is an humbucking pickup made to sound like a 59 Gibson Humbucker which installs directly in place of a strat pickup so no alteration of scratchplate needed.

It is wired up so that the two coils are taken from the centre to a tone pot and the two other ends are taken out to a ground and a hot connection. An article is below to explain this more.

The effect of wiring the humbucker in this way with a tone pot means you can go from full humbucker to single coil and anywhere in between by turning the tone knob on your guitar.

I played this PU and it has a vintage strat sound on the bridge when the tone is fully open but you could warm it up if needed and fatten the sound. The Shads bridge tone was there !

If you do this and put all the PU's on the other tone pot you have a very flexible tone machine indeed. You could also add the mod where you bring the bridge in on any other PU pos on the 5 way too...

No doubt some of you will know this but thought I would share the info and confirm the sound is absolutely single coil strat for this type of guitar work.

Ideal for live playing when the shrill biting tone annoys a bit but also for more flexibility

The Pickup...
http://www.seymourduncan.com/products/electric/stratocaster/medium-output/little_59_for_s/

How too ... see about half way re the pot type connection
http://www.smitspickups.com/coiltapping.htm

That's interesting Roger - thanks for posting that info.

Chas.

Seymour Duncan has a circuit on the website called 'spin a split' or something similar, which gives graduated coil tapping by adding an extra knob.

Mind you, Peavey had a similar feature on the T60 solidbody in about 1979- it had two humbuckers, but the tone control pots gave normal bass to treble tone control from 0-5 then after a detent, increasing the knob from 5-10 gradually cuts out the second coil so that 10 on each tone control is just single coil...

I like these gadgets, but I played the first set at the pub last night using my 335 copy which has separate coil tap switches for each humbucker- good range of sounds, but fiddling about with four knobs and three switches while playing and singing is too confusing! I swapped over to the Strat copy for the rest of the evening- didn't take the Squier Tele last night...but that's the easiest of all to work with!

Gotta go, back playing at the same pub this afternoon....hope my gear is still there......

p.s. hazards of playing gigs in Oz- last weekend did a gig at a rather remote country pub...driving 60 miles home late at night, had to slow down quickly twice..reason being two large kangaroos standing in the road! A bit bigger than a rabbit or a cat etc if you accidentally hit 'em...

Fitted one today and tried it out ... nice Shads sounds one end and humbucker the other and anywhere in beteeen... very flexible.

For anyone wishing to do this I have posted some wiring photos on Charlie Halls site under General.

I would not recommend any other humbucker for this as I have no experience of what sounds they would give so I recommend the Little 59 for Strat for this purpose.