| Per wrote: "Here it might be useful to put in a note on pickup noise and buzz in relation with compression. Myself I have, and still partly am, a big fan for vintage sounding single coil pickups. I totally love the sound idea of letting those twangy notes swim through an ocean of compression - but with a vintage style Stratocaster model guitar that "organ like tone" will most likely be dressed in a murky blanket of exaggerated noise and buzz." I'd carry that a step further and say that pickups themselves have varying levels of compression, with lower output pickups like typical single coils have less compression and greater dynamic range, and higher output pickups like P-90s and humbucking pickups have more natural compression and slightly less dynamic range. Humbuckers are generally louder overall, more complex in the midrange with over all darker tone. I, like you Per tend to favor single coil pickups because of their added top end twang, and also because of their tighter low end,better string to string definition when chording and responsiveness to finger dynamics. Though I like humbuckers, for me single coils work better for multi track looping, multitrack layering in general and large ensemble work with either multiple guitar parts ala african pop or dense keyboards, but I haven't played true single coils in a long time. I've been using noiseless stack designs since they first appeared in the early 80's (maybe earlier, I'm not sure). The first ones from Duncan I used were ok but lacked a certain magic of true single coils. Things have changed a lot since then with all of the major players doing redesigns and offering really good authentic single coil sound without the annoying hum. Currently I use sets from Seymour Duncan (classic stacks plus) Various Kinman's and even a set of fender noiseless which seem to get a bad rap but are actually quite good sounding. There is absolutely no need to subject oneself to that annoying 60 cycle hum any more, and yet I know many people who insist that their 50 odd year old pickup design that sounds like an angry hornets nest when idle is so much greater sounding and more responsive. This is true for P-90 style pickups as well, the stack designs sound good, exactly the same? maybe not, but to me the benefits far out way the disadvantages. if you can't handle that, companies like Suhr http://www.suhrguitars.com/pickups.aspx#top ,make dummy coils that fit on strat backplates so you can add hum canceling to an otherwise buzzy Strat with ought replacing all of the pickups. Bill |