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Jamie West-Oram 'Fixxer' set for Strat

Jamie West-Oram 'Fixxer' set for Strat

£320.00Price

This pickup set was specifically developed for Jamie West-Oram from the incredible band The Fixx.

 

Although Jamie is well known for his Schecter Woody and Suhr guitars with EMG pickups, he has used a variety of guitars over the years to create his signature stereo chorus sound, most recently a stock Fender Custom Shop 62 reissue.

 

Jamie has been a regular customer at Eternal Guitars for set-up and fretwork for a few years, and when he brought in his custom shop Strat recently for a re-fret, we began to discuss pickups. Jamie had been happy with the tone of the Custom Shop pickups that came as standard, and they were actually decent-sounding mass-produced units. Still, once we began discussing tone, it became clear that as good as the pickups were, Jamie would prefer if they could offer a little more oomph in an ideal world.

 

I was confident that we could improve on the stock units and offer a little extra spice without sacrificing the guitar's overall vintage vibe. Jamie's main concern was output. The Custom Shop units were vintage repro, and they were suitably low output, so Jamie asked if we could develop a pickup set that would retain the clarity and brightness of tone he needed for his signature sound but add a little more meat and presence.

 

For us, the early sixties Strat pickups were some of the best ever made, so we started with our own very popular Timeless '60s Style Strat pickups as a template and then tweaked magnet heights to offer a decent string-to-string balance but retained a vintage stagger (crucial for that inherent Stratty-ness) and then began to experiment with different windings. We used forborn flatwork with our unbevelled Alnico 5 pole magnets and vintage gauge 42 AWG coil wire with cloth-covered hookups.

 

The resultant set is balanced tonally but not calibrated in the usual way. After a little more research and development, we settled on a spec that boosted the output on the bridge and neck units but kept the middle one vintage spec wound to ensure that the mix positions retained clarity and didn't muddy up, which was particularly important to Jamie.

 

Jamie was very pleased with the pickups. Although the original plan was to load them onto a spare pickguard so he could swap between our pickup set and the originals, he liked ours so much that we abandoned that plan. In fact, he loved them so much that he named the set The Fixxers and recorded a fantastic video demonstrating the tones on offer, which you can find on our 'Demo Videos' page or on our YouTube Channel.

 

DC Resistance:

Neck 6.5k

Middle 5.7k

Bridge 7.2k, approx.

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