NAMM 2015: New Fender American Standard Stratocaster With Newly Designed Pickup

Tim Shaw humbucker pup and split pot gives a whole new sound to the Strat   22-Jan-15

Fender have released a new American Standard guitar with a bridge humbucker designed by pickup expert Tim Shaw.

The pickup has lower than 8k DC resistance and works in conjunction with a split pot which delivers 500k for the bridge pickup, and 250k for the middle and neck (both single coils).

This gets over the problem of having the same resistance for all three pickups, which, particularly on a HSS setup can make your humbucker sound slightly distant and dampened particularly at higher range frequencies.

So now we have a Fender American Standard Stratocaster available off the shelf with a previously unreleased pickup and a split pot.

As you can hear in the video, you can make it sound a world away from what we commonly call 'the Strat sound'.