Choosing Pickups: Strat with Hot Bridge

Email Question:

“I def want a juicy bucker for the bridge pup as I play heavier prog rock and on all my guitars i use the bridge for the high gain stuff. The others i want to be single-coils since I really love strat cleans ... i don’t want to give up too much nice strat clean sound esp in position 4 but when i flip to the bridge i want some madness and output. So help me on whether the vintage or fat SC pups for the neck/middle are a better bet.”

Answer

It sounds like you want SV5s in the Neck and middle and a Juicy in the bridge. The SV5 is the strattiest of our stuff and will give you the nice open cleans. This set balances well. You should also go for the Split Juicy so you’ll have that option. I’d recommend going 500 k all around for this set, and you’ll need a push pot to actuate the split. I’d also consider doing a blend (and master tone), the neck/bridge combo on this set is pretty sweet.