You never forget your first love. My first love is my first electric guitar -- A Japanese white squire stratocaster from 1993. I bough this for my 13th birthday and I've never looked back. The teenage years were good for this guitar and after a a good setup, it started to sing. It picked up a few knocks and dents but the years of bedroom practice have worn down the back of the neck to a smooth non-sticking finish. The whammy bar worked close enough and the guitar had all 5 of the classic strat sounds. However, in recent years, the guitar has fallen down the pecking order of favourite guitars. The Mexican Hot-strat with the humbucker bridge, "springy" maple fretboard and overall loud output became the primary guitar, relegating the squire to a string-break backup guitar (restring a strat live is a nightmare!). The arrival of the telecaster with its workhorse-esq sounds complemented the hot-strat relegating the squire to the wall! I felt that the strat needed some new life but I didn't want it to become a different guitar, with wild customisation ruining the tone/feel of the guitar. It would be cheaper/easier to buy another guitar for that function. Changing the pickups wasn't really an option as a new set from well-known brands would have cost more than the original guitar.

Andrew Kember, a good friend to me and this blog, recently bought some pickups from http://axetec.co.uk and the low cost combined with glowing reviews got me interested. I found the pickup combination of my dreams - IronGear Smoke Stack II. These bad boys are single coil pickups which have an additional switchable "overwound" coil. So the guitar can sound like a normal classic strat and by pushing a switch (I used 3 push-push pot on the volume/tone), the extra coil is added to the sound. These pickups aren't humbucking but noisy single coils catching the essence of a strat.

One purchase and install later, I'm pleased to say that they have resurrected the squire. The standard sound is really straty - Nice clear neck tones, trebley bridge pickup with the two "funky" sounds deep and groove-some. The pickups are just at the edge of staying clean with no massive volume drop compared to the hotstrat. They crunch and fuzz up well too. I would have been happy with just these sounds. Switching in the extra coils changes things. Its not a massive gain increase comparable to a coil tap but the tone is dramatically changed. The neck pickup has increased clarity whilst maintaining the warmth and the funky sounds are deeper. The bridge pickup is unusual with a clean tone, it honks badly! However, with the addition of gain, this pickup screams into rock tones via SRV fender amp on fire tones - Awesome!! The tone is unmistakably strat single coil but one on steroids, whilst drinking litres of redbull mixed with espresso. Sound bites will follow ...