First of all these pickups sound exactly what you'd expect from a great Strat pickup. Beautiful cleans and bell-tones. Hard to find anything better, in my opinion, if that's the sound you want.

The only reason I don't give 5 stars is because they really should let the buyer know up front that these pickups are specifically designed for guitars with a 7.5" neck radius. Fender used this radius up until around the 80's and then they changed to 9.5". Today you can find Fender Strats with up to 12" radius and some have a compound radius.

My custom made Strat knock-off has a 12" neck radius and because the staggered pole pieces are set up for a significantly smaller radius the string volumes were noticeably unbalanced. The D and G were noticeably louder and the B and E quite a bit weaker.

The good news is that there is a fix. The fix is to push the pole pieces very carefully to move them to proper heights. There are youtube videos that demonstrate this procedure. There is a risk of damaging the pickup if it is not done very carefully. This is explained in some of the videos I watched.

It would be really nice if Fender made these pickups for different neck radii and even option of wound G vs, plain G string.

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Put theis 69' prewired in my 2012 American Deluxe Strat & they ROCK!!! All genres sound amazing!!!

Looks fantastic. Sounds GREAT, but honestly not sure it's all that much better than some Squier pickups I have in other DIY builds. Just saying . . .

I purchased the '69 Strat single coils in mind with either upgrading my 1990 Fender MIM Stratocaster, or replacing the noiseless vintage pickups (DP402/403) in my 1995 US Standard Strat. Ultimately, I decided to put the noiseless pick-ups into the MIM Strat, and the '69ers into the '95 Standard Strat.
Unfortunately, neither of the guitars accepted the pre-assembled pick guard. The hole patterns were slightly off. That was quite an inconvenience as I had to remove the components from all three pick guards and then reassemble two of them.
Sound wise, the '69 have a very pleasant, chimey and touch sensitive character. I do have two other US Standard Strats (2005 & 2015) that are factory equipped with Fender vintage style 50ties single coils. In direct comparison, the '69ers have a more pronounced mid range while not being hotter or less transparent than the earlier vintage pick-ups. The '69ers are not necessarily better, but different in an interesting way.
One star off for the not matching pick guard hole pattern on my '95 US Standard Strat.

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I recently acquired a highway one strat great guitar great player but pickups were meh… was on the fence with going with noiseless jeff beck pick guard but after talking with Brad Jahn at sweetwater he steered me in the right direction to go with the 69' pickguard to get the most genuine fender strat sound I was looking for!!! The sound is there worth every penny and super easy to install !! Buy it and get to playing those genuine fender tones!! Thank you Brad and sweetwater!!!

I had been eyeing this for quite a while, and my wife ended up purchasing it for me for Christmas. This went into a "Squier Series" MiM Stratocaster. Little history on the Squier series... They are actually American bodies that were shipped to Mexico after a fire in a warehouse, and then they were outfitted with Asian electronics. (you can find much longer explanations with a bit of searching online) I have had one of those since ~1996. First electric guitar, and I absolutely love it. Once I dropped this in there, holy cow. I can't even begin to explain what a difference it made. I didn't hate the tone of the old pickups, but this is a whole different level. It is absolutely beautiful. So now, I have a Strat with an American made body, and American electronics. I am sure I could have done the install myself, but it has been a while since I have soldered, so I took it to my local guitar shop, and they installed it. I definitely recommend this upgrade. It is very much worth it.

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Expensive but worth it. If you want authentic Stratocaster tones, these are the pickups to buy. I absolutely love the neck pickup. I put the pickguard in a SSH MIM Strat. Perfect fit.