I wanted a wider tonal palette, so I asked for a pickguard with a 58 neck, 67 middle, and a hot bridge. When it arrived I quickly plopped it into a nice but still unshielded guitar, which I soon realized was a horrible mistake. The pickups are hum canceling, but they have unshielded leads, and the assembly picks up a lot of buzz unless you shield the guitar properly...

So I did a full shielding job on the guitar! This involved taping the cavities with copper and unscrewing everything from the pickguard to cover that in copper too, sealing the shield. Since every customer MUST shield the pickguard to get the most out of the pickups I honestly think mojotone should do it at the factory to save us the trouble! At least as an option for extra dollars.

My complaints end here though! ;-)

The pickups themselves are simply fabulous, and "Bruce" did the neatest soldering job I ever saw. This is quality stuff!

I fell instantly in love with my "new" guitar, the pickups sound great and respond in a very musical fashion to playing dynamics. I don't consider them to be a compromise that sacrifices tone for hum canceling, I see them as great sounding pickups that suit my taste perfectly, the hum canceling is just a bonus!

Mixing the 58 and 67 pickups for a wider palette turned out to be a great idea IMO. It's hard to describe sound in words, but I'll try:

The 58 neck has both fat lows and a gorgeous sparkly high end. It sound fantastic clean or semiclean, and works well for both melodic stuff and jazzy chords.

The 67 middle reigns in the lows and highs and brings forward a well-tuned midrange boost that takes gain like a champ. This is a great lead tone that cuts through without ever becoming too strident.

The hot bridge is well balanced in output with the others. I personally don't really like the tone of strat bridge pickups on their own and rarely use that position, so I always judge it based on if it works well in combination with the middle.

Which fortunately is the case here! 67 middle + hot bridge gives you what I'd consider the perfect tone for funky chords. The hot bridge tames the pushy middle pickup and produces a bright combination sound that is very pleasant to the ears.

Finally, the 58 neck + 67 bridge combination does something almost magical. I'm actually not a great fan of the trademark "quack" many people think a strat should have in this position, and here it is absent. Instead you get a "hollow" sound with a lot of frequencies canceled out. The result is a very elegant tone that has a beautiful and unique *character* to it, and that sits back in a mix with noble humility. Great for rhythm parts you don't wish to take over the mix! It's also a really good lead tone when you crank up the gain. The hollow sound reigns in the wobbly character of the inharmonic plain G string a bit and makes it sound a little cleaner. Good for that "singing" lead tone.

I'll finish by giving these pickups a wholehearted recommendation! Mixing pickups like I did is a very viable option if you can't decide which set you like best. Do they sound EXACTLY like single coils? No, they do not, but they are pretty close, and they sound great in their own right. I'd say they're just a little different from single coils, not worse.

P.S. A small tip is to adjust these pickups higher than you'd normally do with single coils. It gives more output and a higher signal to noise ratio, but it doesn't cause the magnets to pull too hard on the strings as normal single coils do (a guitar tone disease sometimes called "stratitis").

Yesterday I received the prewired Quiet Coils 58 Hot Bridge Pickguard and I was impressed by the soldering and the general quality.

But after installing it I played the first notes I was totally blown away by the sound and feel of the pickups, no treble loss when turning down the volume and no 60s cycle hum as I expected....

My Robert Cray Signature Stratocaster never sounded better!

My wife said "hmmm....yeah, this sounds great..." but she did not understand why I was so floored as she did not grew up with the hum that true singlecoils produce ;-)

These pickups sound so great that they would even be great option if you where just looking for another real good, dynamic low output singlecoil set.

They react to every picking dynamic, sound open and they can really bite if you want to let them bite ;-)

But the fact that they produce no hum is awesome!

As our son is 14 months old now I have to play my Laney L5 Class A valve head with the integrated headphones in the evening.

You can imagine that the singlecoil hum is a bigger problem when playing with headphones!

It`s literally always in the head :-D

So the quiet coils are a real big deal for me and the first noiseless pickups that really SOUND like real singlecoils.

I always thought of purchasing another Strat with noiseless pickups as a backup for difficult live situations. That would have been a compromise in sound but with no hum in these situations.

But having true singlecoil sound without hum issues is so good.

Maybe I am one of the first customers from Germany with a prewired Quiet Coils pickguard and I will recommend this to my guitar playing friends as often as I can!