DP117 HS-3 Single-coil Pickup - White

Works great

SOunds as they say, excellent product, now it has a similiar sound with a small set up like his settings, but I would recommend this even if you consider to buy the new pickups. DiMarzio still is a great brand even for this pick up stack

is the guitar god, these pickups are great and will give you a nice sound but wont give you his skill...that you cannot buy for any price unfortunately

Thank you from www.music-blvd.com

First of all, bear in mind that this is NOT a high-output pickup by any stretch of the imagination. It's not meant to be. In fact, the output is lower than the stock Fender MIM strat pickups. Now, whatever you think of Yngwie Malmsteen, he has one of the best strat tones on planet earth. His approach is to take a good, clean pickup and overdrive the daylights out of the signal at the amp or stomp box. If you start off with a loud, overdriven sound from your guitar, it'll never sound good - just distorted. That's the idea behind the DiMarzio HS-3 - low output, great tone. This pickup really sings. And it maintains the clarity of your notes, which can be a good or a bad thing. It's good if your picking technique is good. If you suck and you install this pickup, you're still going to suck, but you'll suck with the best tone imaginable. It's not very forgiving - you can't play slop or everybody will know you're playing slop. But if you've got your act together and want incredible strat tone, you can't go wrong with the HS-3. The added bonus is that there's no annoying 60Hz hum. The sound is a little fatter than a standard single coil. Also, since it's technically a humbucker (coils are stacked vertically), you'll want to use a 500K volume pot to keep the highs intact. If you want a darker sound, a 250K pot should do just fine. This pickup's wired for a coil tap but I don't see the point in using it. I play almost every Sunday in our church and my stratocaster is the guitar I'm usually playing, and the HS-3 is perfect for this application due to the absence of noise and the great overall tone. When I kick in the extra overdrive for a solo, the thing just takes off. Note that I have an HS-1 (no longer in production) in the middle and an HS-4 in the neck. If you don't do this, the "in-between" positions lose some of that "quack" because for some reason they don't seem to "quack" properly when mixed with a stock single coil. But when mixed with other HS-series pickups in the in-between position, you're quacking like a duck.

The media could not be loaded.  This was my favorite pickup for many years. If you have a 5 way switch on a strat, the 2 and 4 position yields very good stratty tones. The 1 position gives it a good, twangy clean sound. Overdriven, it sounds like low output blues pickup. Don't be fooled by the Yngwie tones people try to get from their guitars, because that is not all it does. Eric Johnson uses the HS2, which is like the HS3, except brighter. In the video, I give some clean sounds, and then some shred sounds. If you are going to emulate the shred-metal tones a lot of people like from this pickup, you need a dirty sound with an overdrive to boost the signal. In the video, I use the Boss DS1 for my distortion, and put the Boss SD1 in front of it.

I had these pickups in all positions of my strat. Compared to a standard single coil, these pickups significantly lower output, more "punchy", they "swell up" as you attack the string harder, they are more "compressed" because of the high DC resistance, which makes them perfect for high gain situations. They still retain some of the single-coil qualities, but they are not even close to vintage tones. They sound like a cross breed between a fullsize humbucker and a strat, with all the above mentined qualities.I highly recommend these pickups.

these are great, if not the be all and end all for stacked humbuckers. they cancel the hum and have a bigger sound than the original strat pickups. they keep the character of the strat tone however, which for me is a good thing. if you want to get rid of the strat tone, buy the hot rails kind of design, but I dont have to because I have a Les Paul as well. it just depends on what kind of music you play and what you want from your guitar.