FenderPure Vintage '61 Stratocaster Pickup Set

Just awesome!

60 cycle hum really bad

These sound amazing in my custom shop strat. Better and more convincing than the stock pickups. Better than my fralins too for less $. If you're looking for A5 vintage stagger and vintage sound you can't go wrong.

My favorite guitars are Stratocasters, and in my Strats I've been able to try a few different sets of pickups. The Fender Strat pickups I have include Pure Vintage '65, Pure Vintage '57/'62, Tex-Mex, Texas Special, and Custom Shop '69. I also have a set of Seymour Duncan SSL-1s. I like them all for different reasons. Until now, I was pretty settled on Pure Vintage '65s as my favorite Strat pickups. I was not looking for something better.Cut to about a year ago: Fender released a new vintage-styled line of guitars called the American Vintage II. The guitar in that line that piqued my interest was the American Vintage II '61 Stratocaster. The pickups were apparently brand-new to the line--they were simply called '61 pickups (I don't think they were named 'Pure Vintage' at that point). Some of the demos sounded so impressive that I messaged Fender and asked them if they would someday offer those pickups in the aftermarket. Fender replied (at the time) that they had 'no plans' to release those pickups for public sale. I was a bit disappointed.A few months later, I found a set of these pickups by happy accident: someone had taken their set out of an American Vintage II '61 Strat and offered them on the used market, and I was lucky enough to find them. Without thinking twice about it, I decided to put together a Strat partscaster based around this unicorn set of pickups.I've been playing that guitar with these pickups for about six months. Pure Vintage '61s are a lot like Custom Shop '69s, in that they're vintage-voiced and low-output; the mids are pretty scooped, treble is very prominent, and bass is tight and punchy. As with the Custom Shop '69s, I dial the tone knobs back a few notches to control the brightness. The Pure Vintage '61s are slightly higher output, a little less thin sounding, with a tiny bit more mids, and the bass is a little more present than Custom Shop '69s. I think they are great for 1966-68 period Hendrix, when he was still playing Strats with rosewood fretboards and Marshall JTM amps.I didn't expect to like these pickups this much. The Strat partscaster I tossed together around these pickups has become my current favorite Strat. These pickups provide vintage Strat sounds in all positions. I play that guitar every day, and it has me rethinking all of the pickups in my other Strats, because I think these might be the best Strat pickups I've ever played.I'm actually pretty shocked that Pure Vintage '61s apparently have not generated a lot of buzz yet. This is a terrific set of pickups, and I hope they earn a permanent place in Fender's pickup family. They are truly worth it.