Review

I was first made aware of WCR pickups through Greg Howard who at the time was on the road with Aerosmith handling the guitar tech duties of Brad Whitford. WCR pickups was kind enough to send us a set of their SR single coil pickups to drop in a strat and we were not a bit disapointed.

Jim Wagner winds the pickup sets one at a time by hand and takes the time to get to know the customers needs before selling them pickups. His attention to detail was apparent right upon opening the package. The pickups were mounted in order and very neatly adhered to cardboard. Every wire is color coded and very simple detailed instructions are included. They are not simply thrown in a box. Its very obvious WCR wants to make sure the customer has a hassle free installation.

Now its time to play them. If you are looking for single coils to make your strat sound like a Les Paul you are looking at the wrong pickups. The SR set is vintage strat tone to the bone! Ive always been a fan of the strat quack in the 2nd and 4th pickup positions and the SR set delivered that in spades. Clear bell like strat tone is available in all positions. I found that they are very responsive to my pick attack and that is my favorite part of the SRs.The SRs sound like a strat should, not noiseless, not active boosts but flat out vintage strat beautiful clear tone. The cool thing about the SRs is that they make me want to play clean. No need to mask the tone with gobs of gain they let my strat breathe like i want it to. To be blunt we were blown away with the pickups.

Not a huge company WCR pickups are made one at a time with care. My strat used to cover my humbucker duties with a stacked humbucker in the rear slot. Needless to say another guitar will handle those duties now. If you are into the vintage tones that SRV and Jimi had the SRs will do a great job in getting you closer to those elusive tones. I now have my strat back.