Can You Make Your Squier or Starter Guitar Sound Way More Expensive?
If you play guitar and someone else bought you your first guitar, there’s a good chance you have a Bullet or Affinity Stratocaster laying around. Though these guitars manage to hold their own surprisingly well against more expensive options, real Fender strats generally sound a bit better. Many young players, therefore, wonder whether they might simply fix a few frets and change pickups to achieve a true Fender tone. Is this possible?
When To Change Your Pickups
Guitars these days are way better than they used to be. Back in the 70s and 80s, cheap instruments were plagued with deal-breaking playability issues like tuning instability, fret buzzing, and electrical problems. Today, you can get a strat-style instrument for 150 bucks that is difficult to tell is cheap unless you’re an experienced player.
There’s often little reason to change anything about your Squier or other starter guitar. Pickups can cost almost as much as a cheap guitar, and you might even sell your guitar and buy a better one for the price of your proposed improvements.
If you like the sound your current electronics are producing, don’t worry about how much better things could be. Just leave it. If you’re underwhelmed or annoyed by your sound, on the other hand, it’s time for a change.
You should understand, though, that a lot of elements make a guitar play and feel good or bad, and pickups are just one. Other things to consider are:
Fret heights
Action
Tuners
Electronics
Cable and amplifier issues
In short, you should only attempt a pickup change once you’ve established that these other issues aren’t causing your problem and that simply buying a better guitar isn’t a more reasonable solution.
What Pickups Should You Buy?
Pickups can dramatically affect your sound, and they dramatically vary in price, so it’s natural to assume that there is some voodoo magic going on inside of them. Really, though, pickups are pretty simple electronic devices, and you’ll get diminishing returns for every dollar you spend.
Price usually indicates reliability and brand recognition more than quality, and for the budget shopper, brand recognition isn’t usually a priority. You might pay 100 to 200 dollars per pickup for the most hyped Fenders or Seymour Duncans on the market, but you’ll be spending more than the price of the whole guitar, and that’s just dumb.
So that leaves you with one option: get something cheap. And if you have a Stratocaster, you’ll want something that resembles a real Fender.
Perhaps counterintuitively, real strats use lower output Alnico pickups, while Squiers use relatively hot ceramic pickups. This is why Bullets can sometimes sound a little “too much.” Buying something weaker allows your amp to do more of the work, and you’ll get some spanky, chimey clean tones you could previously only dream of.
Do Pickups Make That Much of a Difference?
Swapping your magnets will make a difference, but there’s no guarantee you’ll be blown away after you put away your soldering iron. Changes are usually most evident with clean tones or with light distortion. If you plan to layer on a ton of effects, be prepared to wonder whether your upgrades made any difference at all.
Here’s a quick video on just such a thing:
So now that you have all the information, it’s time to decide—do you want to put in the work, or would you rather just buy the guitar you wanted in the first place? A custom job can bring you closer to your instrument, but it can also waste time and money. It’s up to you, friend.
If you enjoyed this post, keep browsing Metalblog. Also check out our continuously updated book projects.