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Ever wonder how to choose the perfect pickup for your HSS Strat? You’re not alone. Check out these 5 steps below.

Define your tone
Focus on the pickup(s) you use most
Consider your guitar’s acoustic voice (or tonewoods)
Use Seymour Duncan’s online pickup resources
Base your following pickup choices on your first

Tech Tips: These steps apply to choosing any pickup configuration. But we get a lot of questions about HSS sets.

Define your tone

To find the perfect pickups for your tone, you have to define what that tone is. Do you want a balance of warmth and clarity for bluesy cleans? Do you want the touch response of a traditionally crafted PAF humbucker? Or are you looking for something that will push your amp to the extreme? Answer this question, and you’ll have a much easier time finding the perfect pickups for your HSS Strat.

Focus on the pickup(s) you’ll use most

When building your own pickup sets, it’s beneficial to focus on one pickup at a time. And you should start with the pickup you use the most. If your thing is edge-of-breakup from a Strat neck pickup, a Strat-style neck pickup is where you’ll want to start. If you hang out on the bridge humbucker the most, that’s where you’ll want to begin your search.

The reason for this has to do with complementing your main tone. You need to be happy with the pickup you use most. But when you venture outside of that sound, you want your other pickups to support and expand upon it.

Consider your guitar’s acoustic voice (tonewoods?)

In choosing the best HSS pickups, it’s essential to understand your guitar’s natural tonal properties. And tonewoods play a big part in this. Yes, we said it. Tonewoods do matter. And the most commonly used tonewoods do have some generally accepted tonal qualities that can help you narrow your pickup search.

Our friends and tonewood experts at Warmoth.com explain them like this…

Mahogany: Warm and full with good sustain
Swamp Ash: A very musical wood offering a very nice balance of brightness and warmth with a lot of “pop”
Maple: Very bright with long sustain and a lot of bite
Rosewood: big warm tones with smooth high-end roll-off
Basswood: A nice, growly, warm tone with focused mids—Its defined sound cuts through a mix well
Alder: The tone is the most balanced, with equal doses of lows, mids, and highs

So if you have a mahogany guitar, but you want more cut and top-end, you’d select a brighter pickup. If you have a guitar made out of swamp ash with too much treble, a darker pickup is just the ticket.

Use Seymour Duncan’s online pickup resources

We’ve gone to great lengths to help you on your HSS Strat pickup journey. Our site includes a wealth of resources to give you the info you need to make a great choice. This includes sound samples, our Pickup Finder tool, and a ton of in-depth articles about many of our models.

sound samples amp

Sound Samples

Nearly all of our pickup product pages feature professionally recorded examples of that pickup in action. You can hear them within multiple contexts and with varying shades of overdrive. It’s the perfect opportunity to test drive each pickup before you buy.

guitar choices in our pickup finder

Pickup Finder

Our online Pickup Finder is one of the most powerful pickup selection tools we have. By answering a few simple questions about your guitar and tonal preferences, it can point you to time-tested and popular HSS pickup configurations you’ll love.

Click Here to find out more or use the link below

https://seymourduncan.zendesk.com/hc/en-us