Ultra Noiseless Vintage Passive Telecaster 2-piece Pickup Set - Black/Chrome Review

Exactly as advertised: noiseless and vintage (but no 4-way)

I used these to build my own Texas Tea Ultra Telecaster, since Fender's price, weight, and contours weren't to my liking. They are a good price for what you get. The best I can explain these pickups is that they do exactly what they claim to do: utterly noiseless, and they sound like a medium-output vintage single coil set. There is a noticeable difference in the three neck, both,… read more and bridge positions--that's good, since there's no point in having a neck and bridge that sound the same--and they are bright and telecaster-ish without being thin. If you've listened to the videos on them, they sound like that: telecaster-y. They don't sound like something else, including that they don't sound like Hot Noiseless strat pickups, and they don't sound like you are putting a humbucker in the neck (although technically you are), so if you want something else buy something else. This makes your telecaster sound like a telecaster. I'm happy with that, but I mention it because for some reason I assumed these would sound a bit more like the strat versions. I'm glad they don't. They are a bit tall (as Fender noiseless usually are, since they are stacked humbuckers) so I needed to deepen my pickup cavities by a few millimeters. They wired up easily to a three-way switch with 250k pots, using the included diagram (which says those are the pots to use). It would have made my life easier if the wires were two inches longer but they were just barely long enough. One thing to note: I could not get this to work correctly with an Oak Grigsby 4-way switch. One person who claims to know says this is typical and you won't get good results trying for a 4th position, unless you use a Fender OEM S-1 switch. I don't know one way or the other, I can only tell you that I gave up on the 4-way. They work great with a normal three-way.

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