Seymour Duncan Billy Gibbon S Red Devil Pickup Set - White

Sound really good

Supposedly voiced to approximate the tone of Billy Gibbons' Les Paul on his Strat. I was skeptical, but these really do take a Strat into fat, juicy, sweet Gibson territory – very suitable for jazz, Chicago blues, etc.They do this by thoroughly negating the silky, chimey tone you normally get from a Strat's tremolo springs. If you install Red Devils on your only Strat, I'd recommend wiring them to 3 push-pulls, so you can switch each pickup's coils from series to parallel to also get some Strat-like tones.I'm now playing this one Strat far more than my cherished, upgraded PRS set-neck guitars and LP copies. It has a magical combination of Strat aesthetics, Gibson punch, and added snap and aliveness from the bolt-on maple neck.The 3 pups are wound for distinct tones – that's not marketing hype. The neck pup is dark and round. The bridge pup actually has better tonal balance than any full-size Duncan bridge humbucker that I've tried on my (shallow-depth) PRS guitars: It has enough mids for body, balanced by enough highs to not honk. The result is a sweet, oboe-like tone, close to what you hear on Neil Young's first few albums.The middle pup is surprisingly loud. To balance volumes, I had to mount it much lower than the other two. I'm guessing this loudness is deliberate, to facilitate recessed mounting to promote quack in positions 2 and 4. But there's minimal quack there. Still, this pup sounds thinner than the outside two, so it's the nearest thing to single-coil sounds without splitting coils.Strat-sized humbuckers with alnico magnets are a recent option. These don't have the sag or squash of traditional alnico Strat pups (because that would undercut the not-a-Strat illusion). But they also avoid the harshness of ceramic pups.I love 'em, and now have the bridge version on a 2nd Strat.