Artec MLA97 Alnico 5 Covered Mini Humbucker Electric Guitar Neck Pickup 8.4K

This went into the neck position of a "Chelecaster", and it darn well holds its own against the bridge pickup. It's pretty close to exactly what I wanted - notably darker than its bridge partner, but not too much. That way the neck-bridge series combination sounds strong, yet sufficiently distinct from the neck-alone (I put a 4-way selector in this guitar, and also a phase swap push-pull on the neck). I only used two of the 4+shield wires (the bridge pickup is noiseless).

Put this in a tele and it just sings. With the coil split it gets really nice single coil tones. I put a dual rail tele style pickup in the bridge and it's the most versatile guitar I own. Price is unbelievable for how good this thing sounds.

I put these into a Chinese Les Paul copy and they sound absolutely amazing. I'm a big P90 fan, and these are somewhat similar to those, but with no single coil noise. They have just the right amount of bite with an overdrive pedal in front of a tube amp set for the edge of breakup. Very clear and very articulate pickups. I'm going to be very tempted to put these into another guitar just because they sound so good.The instructions said to wire the south start as hot and the north start as ground. This is certainly OK, but I added coil splitting, and this would use the slug side (rather than the screw side) on the single coil setting. For this reason, I used the north start as hot and the sound start as ground. It makes no difference for the full humbucker and works much better you add coil splitting.The only downside (and it's not the fault of the pickups) is that mounting them nice into a regular humbucker slot isn't completely straightforward. They come with adapter rings for soapbar P90 guitars, but you will need a humbucker-style trim ring with an insert to cover the extra space. I ended up custom making the insert on our CNC machine. Not a big deal, but it would be great if someone sold humbucker trim rings with smaller vertical openings to fit these mini-humbuckers.

I wind my own pickups. I am very quality concious and know the fine details. I bought this miniHB for the neck position of a 12 string tele build I wanted to keep on the inexpensive side of things. Lots of guitarists could use a 12, here and there, but hate to pay for one.When the guitar came togther, I was stunned at how good this pickup sounded. Really good, like a vintage Gibson mini. Now I need to build a LP Deluxe clone to use a pair of them.

Incredible deal for excellent sound