artifex_adrift's Metal Music Gear Setup

DISCLAIMER: As with all my strats, everything under the hood electronics-wise has been modded.

However as far as the guitar itself, this is by far my favorite stratocaster. I was on the fence in terms of going for another soft V-shape neck strat since I really enjoy playing my Fender Vintera 50s model. After reading up on all of the improvements of the American Professional II, I had to see what the fuss was about. The attention to detail and the additional features puts this thing way out in the forefront of Fender's modern implementation of this classic guitar. The staggered tuning posts, beveled neck and fret edges, 22nd fret (thanks to the over-hang fretboard), adjustable neck shim post, carved-out neck cavity and shaped bolt plate, and the surprisingly (for me) modern C-shape neck blow me away.

Sure, you can get a more affordable model, something that is a GREAT guitar like a Custom Shop series, but after 5 minutes of playing this thing I knew immediately where the extra money went. Stock, it has a pickup-coupling push-push switch on one tone knob, and a treble bleed in the volume knob. It sounds great with the V-Mod single coils, but I had other plans and dug in with some serious mods I have wanted to do for a while. I'm glad I picked this model, because now I can't put this guitar down.

I first bought one of these maybe 17 years ago or so, and put it into one of my earlier model Fender Stratocasters in both the neck and bridge position. The output on these pickups is really great for solo work on the higher note strings, and depending on how much gain and the tone you're working with you can get some really crunchy rhythm sounds out of them. The neck pickup is my favorite for noodling around with, if you back off the tone a little bit you get those round, syrupy runs with a great amount of sustain. The only downside is when I plug into an amp after jamming on a different guitar/pickup, I have to do some knob tickling to get that hot mud sound out of the low E string. It's not a fault of the pickup, they just run hotter and have different tonal characteristics than stock pickups, so they're definitely purpose-built for shredding on a certain setup to get the most out of them. I have an older stratocaster I've had for over 20 years that I'm going to clone soon, and if it's any indication of how I feel over the long-term about these pickups, I'm going to drop a set of these in the clone.

I like to experiment with single-coil size pickups that are built around humbucker architecture. The Hot Stack seemed like a unique combination of Seymour Duncan's previous iterations of things like Hot and Cool Rails, but with a different approach. I like the single bar magnet for the same reason I like the stacked blade designs in my Hot and Cool Rails: less drop-outs when going for those big bends that I'm a fan of.

The way the coils are stacked in this model give it a really hard punch for higher output, but one thing I noticed is there is still a very traditional single-coil sound laying across the signal, but much thicker. Between coil tapping (I used the variable pot versus binary switch this time) and using a lower value filter capacitor on the tone knob, I was able to get some Greg Howe tones out of this pickup.

For the much heavier stuff I still defer to my Seymour Duncan TB-15 pickup, but the Hot Stack is still way up there in terms of shredability, and has that nice snappy sound that raises your tone above an overly lower-mid range pickup that plays a little muddy on certain amps.