Pickups for a Poplar Body Strat?

[GilmourD]

Just me... But I'd rather go with a steel block than a brass block... But, again, that's just me.

[uOpt]

Don't do anything too special yet. A steel block, better saddles, a set of SSL-1s. First stabilize the situation, then mess with it.

Also, you want good resell value on all that stuff, and the above got it.

Also, just in case I would order a set of 6 trem screws, a claw and spring from Callaham. They cost very little.

[IMENATOR]

I have a Ritchie Sambora Standard wich is Poplar body, rosewood neck and Floyd Rose bridge. It is my first electric guitar too and I don't have plans of selling it, maybe getting a blonde sister (maple neck) later.

I guess you may choose your pickups depending of what kind of music you want to play. I used to have an HSS configuration from stock with ceramic single coils and a DiMarzio PAF but I wanted a noiseless neck for solos.

My first pickup change was removing the neck true single coil and installed a DiMarzio YJM (it was before Yngwie switched to SD). It was a good combo to play with distortion (volume drop did not matter, distorition is about saturation anyway), very nice contrast between neck and bridge but the downside was unbalanced volume output when playing clean. I have to say playing neck about fret 12 was very cool, I was abe to get that Jason Becker deep bending sound from Altitudes middel section.

After that I wanted a heavier sound, more metal like but still been able to enjoy playing solos with the neck pickup so after some research I tried the SD Jazz/JB combo. I agree with other coments in this threard, you are safe using JB in a poplar guitar, I really like it since it has more bite than a PAF so I can play some metal with the proper distortion, about the Jazz neck it has a very nice clean and solos thru distortion are very articulated. When you combine Jazz/JB in the middle position of the HH configuration you get a nice crispy sound I also liked to plean clean tones. The Jazz has a nice split sound too by the way.

Finally I got to a point where I was missing that classic strat quack. Jazz split + middle stock single coil was fine but not good enough. Instead of droping a duckbucker in the middle I wanted go back to a noiseless single coil and installed a STK-S6 Custom Stack. It sounds like a single coil, it is noiseless and I was able to get a nice quack when split and combined with the stock middle single coil. The STK-S6 has enough bite to play distorion and match the JB when doing solos.

I know it sounds like a long story but the thing is I have felt satisfied with my poplar strat along with some popular pickups from Seymour Duncan. I hope it helps!!