When noiseless single-coil pickups are discussed, it won’t be long before someone says that they can never sound exactly like a real single coil. The fact that they’re humbuckers at the core means that some of that high-end sparkle disappears. There are some things to remember at this point.

Firstly – which real single coil are they talking about? They all sound different already. Are we meant to assume that there’s some unifying characteristic between every single coil pickup, missing from none of them, but missing from all noiseless versions? Seems unlikely.

Secondly, these are small differences we’re talking about here. Yes, when you are playing clean, alone, you might hear some differences. Not necessarily negative differences, but differences. But in a band situation, volume up, gain rolled up a bit, these differences all but vanish. What you’re left with is single coil tone, without the hum creeping in on all the quiet bits.

Thirdly, a lot of these opinions were formed ten to fifteen years ago when noiseless single coils started to take off a little more. But in that time, the technology has come on in leaps and bounds. It’s really quite difficult to find a noiseless single coil now with the problem of lost treble.
On top of all this, I have bad wiring in my house. I love single coil sounds, but the hum is really unbearable. So noiseless single coils are an absolute godsend for me.

I’m a big fan of the Seymour Duncan Stack Plus pickups. You can pretty much replace an SSL-1 true single coil with an STK-S4 Classic Stack plus, and the same goes for the SSL-5 or SSL-6 Custom pickups and the STK-S6 Custom Stack Plus. I have a Strat with two Classic Stack Plus in the neck and middle and a Custom Stack Plus in the bridge position. Having a hotter bridge pickup like that is a popular modification to a Strat.

Given that the STK-S6 is based on the SSL-5, and the SSL-5 was originally developed as a bridge pickup for David Gilmour, it seems appropriate that I should cover one of his solos to demonstrate the STK-S6 pickup:

But I wanted to also try a more vintage-type setup, with a lower output bridge.
Originally I put three Classic Stack Plus pickups in the guitar, but actually, this was a step too far. There just wasn’t enough output in the bridge position to keep up with the other two pickups, and the amount of treble produced by the vintage windings was too ice-picky.

Luckily, the folks at Seymour Duncan have thought of this, and this is where the Vintage Hot Stack Plus comes in. It’s just a hair hotter than the Classic Stack plus, which makes it perfect for the bridge position. It’s a lot like having a calibrated set of single coils – the bridge pickup has just enough extra windings on it to bring it up to the level of the other two pickups, without shifting the frequency response enough to stop it sounding like a vintage pickup.

The Stack Plus pickups are splittable. The main use for this would be to achieve hum cancelling if they were combined with a non-stacked single coil, or one coil from a humbucker. The latter is common in HSS Strats. Splitting the Stack Plus pickups simply removes the hum-cancelling coil from the equation, leaving in its place a genuine single-coil pickup.

So now I can play vintage Strat sounds in my living room to my heart’s content. Here’s a demo I recorded. There’s a clean demo and then a demo with a bit more gain. Sorry about the strange volume glitch at 3:00 – I have no idea what happened!

The Stack Plus pickups recently became available in parchment and cream, as well as the usual black and white – so there’s an option for every color scheme. The same goes for the single-coil-sized humbuckers and the rails pickups.

Have you tried noiseless single coils recently?