Ok so I installed the pickups late last night and threw in a few mods I wanted as well. First was a treble bleed which I ended up taking back out because it made the pot linier instead of a nice taper. Next I wanted to do the blender mod but turns out you have to have a special pot in order for that to work. So I have a volume and a master tone that works great!
The pickups Custom shop 69's honestly for $145 is not worth it. I wasn't blown away by them at all. First I know they are all wired the same polarity but these pickups have so much 60 cycle hum its unreal, the GFS pickups I had in it were way more quite standing in front of a powerline dragging the strings across the cables and they were not noiseless pickups, in fact they were the generical equivelent being a 64' surf set over wound at almost double the power.
Next there was the fact that there is way too much wax on these pickups I had to scrap some of it off just to put my covers on that I wanted to use. Which is the other problem I don't know if the screw holes were tapped at the factory or not but there was so much wax in those things you had to start by poking the wax out then get a wood screw to start a hole for you or a tap if you wanna do it right. Then you could screw your mounting screws in to the hole before you installed them on your pickguard.
Last complaint was that none of them were labled indicating bridge middle neck. So I hope you got a volt meter so you can get your hotest pickup in the right order. I used one at work.
Tone was good. The pickups sounded a lot like my GFS but I figure thats a product of the electronics I have in it rather then the true tone of the pickups. The cleans were nice and ballsy, but distortion was shity and sounded ok but the bass seemed too powerful. Not very ballenced like they said it was.
For quality I would say I would give it a 2.5 out of 5 stars due to the untapped holes and excess wax
For Tone I would say solid 3... My GFS pickups just were better quality and sounded way better I'll give the GFS a 4.
For Value of my purchase I'd give GFS a 5 and and the CS 69's a 2.
How happy am I with it? Well it validates what I've said for years GFS makes damn good pickups. the 69's aren't crap I just need to figure out how the hell I'm going to tame that hummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm............................................
I will keep the pickups in the guitar for now because I hope they will grow on me but Those GFS pickups are not sitting around they have plans to move to my white MIM Stratocaster where the neck pickups will be dropped and the bridge pickup will be my middle, and the middle will be the neck pickup. I have a GFS Humbucker in the White Strat and its not going nowhere.
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