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Review: Benson '63 Strat Pickup Upgrade
hi guys,
Recently, Adam graciously sent me a set of Benson '63 strat pickups to try out. It has taken me forever, but this week I finally got the pickups installed in my Ash Sratocaster and I'm in a position to document my experiences. I wasn't sure where to put this in the forum, so admins, please move to wherever you think it should be. Anyway on with the review...
The pickups came nicely boxed, with each pickup individually wrapped in brown paper and twine - a nice touch that added to the overall sense that this was a 'vintage' product. Nice.
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Each pickup also comes with vintage, push-back cloth wire that is really stiff. It's solid, high-quality stuff and made working with the pickups very easy indeed. My biggest concern about the pickup swap was that I would lose my nice gold pickup mounting screws, but I should not have worried. The Benson pickups went straight into the pickguard using the standard Pitbull screws. Magic!
Fortunately, strat wiring is very straight forward; especially with these import 5-way switches. With just the 3 hot wires to take from the switch motherboard, and a common earth to remove from the back of the first tone pot, the stock pickups were quickly removed and replaced.
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The push-back vintage wire made soldering a dream, with no risk of shorts in both the hot and earth wires. The stiffness of the wire meant that I could easily run all three wires down the centre of the pickguard to easily match the control route in the body. No messing around pushing wires back under the pickguard while I tried to fit it this time! I used a couple of zip ties to keep everything nice and neat, and trimmed the length of the middle and bridge pickup wires to keep them all the same length. A pretty neat job all up, and I am very impressed at how easy the Benson wiring made it.
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With the wiring done and tap-tested to make sure everything was good, the pickguard was screwed back into place and she was ready to rock again.
So the big question is, just how do the Benson pickups sound? Well, there is no question that the sound of the Bensons is a vast improvement over the stock offering. That is not to say that the stock pickups sound bad at all! Being a little gun-shy over such an important demo, I cajoled my friend Jonathan from Sydney rockabilly band 'Rock Cat Rock' to do some demos for me. When he first picked up the strat he actually remarked at how good the Stock pickups sounded!
But there is no doubt that the Benson's sound an order of magnitude better. The sound is fuller with a much better dynamic range. Highs are clearer, with a beautiful crispness to the sound. The string attack sounds just beautiful and the mid range is there in abundance.
We recorded two sessions. One with the Stock pickups, and then again with the Bensons. I have turned these sessions into 3 demo videos. The first shows the stock pickups, the second the Bensons, and the third provides a side-by-side comparison of the two. Although I don't have a great set-up for recording, I hope that the videos provide some comparison of the two set-ups. The guitar is being played clean into a Fender Deluxe Re-issue tube amp.
You'll find the videos in each of 3 the following posts.
What do you guys reckon? If anyone *really* needs a demo of me bludgeoning a Ramones track to death on this new beast then please let me know - I think that I can just about manage that ;). I gotta say that all up I think that the Bensons sounds amazing and a big thanks to Adam for giving me this opportunity to upgrade my axe and to enjoy the Bensons. I cannot recommend this upgrade more highly!
cheers,
Gav
