So the story for this particular tone chase starts with John Mayer. Yes, I'm slightly ashamed to admit that I listen to JM. After all, he is responsible for some vomit-inducing chart toppers. And his voice is annoying. However, if you don't already know it, he's an excellent guitarist. That's only my opinion but if you want to form your own then you should listen to him before coming to any conclusions.
Regardless of his musical crimes/contributions, to me there is no doubt of the quality of his tone. It's one of the top Strat tones that I've heard in recent times. That mix of clarity and aggression when overdriven, punchiness and responsiveness when clean.
Of course, tone chasing is fraught with assumptions, money sapping purchases and is never-ending. There are many parameters contributing to the final guitar sound - things like the guitar players touch/skill, the amplifier and how it's set, the pedals, pedal order, pedal settings, cable length, speaker, volume, etc etc etc. Not all of these parameters can be fully controlled or emulated accurately and there are endless permutations to consider.
Given the limitations of said approach, it is still fun to try :). It may be foolish to try and emulate someone's tone using different pedals and a different amp at a reasonable volume, but I would love to see how close I get. Enjoy the journey, I say. You may not get to your intended destination but you may find something even more interesting along the way.
I believe that pickups contribute a LOT to the final sound of a given rig. Some people like to spend a lot of time obsessing over smaller details (i.e. nitro vs poly) in the tone quest. It astounds me if I find out that these same guys are not spending the same amount of time on pickups. Do two pickups from the same manufacturer sound the same? How consistent are they if they are “scatter wound”? There should be way more discussions in the forums about that than “nitro vs poly”! Have these people already made up their minds on speakers, strings, pickups, picks etc and have now graduated to arguing about guitar finish?
Anyway, JM does have a signature set of pickups. I believe they are included in his signature series Strat, and are advertised as "low-inductance" pickups. I started looking those up, and generally looking up as many details about JM's pickups as I could.
That was when I came across Klein pickups. I listened to demos of their pickups, and they sounded impressive (as many of these manufacturer clips do, of course) but one in particular stood out to me - the Jazzy Cat set. According to the Klein website it was used in their "Black One Strat". I wasn't sure if they sold any guitars but that's an obvious reference to the CS Strat that JM uses. The demos were done through a Two Rock amp so I'm pretty sure that contributed a lot to how great those clips sound. JM uses Two Rock amps, the clips are some of his song sections, and there’s a reference to his guitar – this is obviously targeted and JM tone chasers…perfect, that’s me for now!
Fast forward to a year or two later, I finally decide to purchase a set of these pickups for the new Strat that I was putting together. So how did the Jazzy Cats fare? Read on...
How they fared
Before I begin with this section...I should state how this whole experiment/review is flawed. It's flawed because I'm doing a review of a set of pickups on a guitar that I've just assembled. It's not a great way to do a review because I've never put another set of pickups on that same guitar. Sure, I could compare it to all the other similarly spec'd strats I've played...but that's not really a fair comparison. I'd rather compare 2 products with controlled parameters, A/B when possible.
So now that that's out of the way...
I'm quite happy with this set of pickups. It's may not be the secret sauce that you are missing to get the JM tone...it's never going to be that unless you have all the OTHER ingredients close to being right (which I evidently don't!). However it is a great set of pickups and the night I installed it I spent ~3 hours without a break playing through it.
One of the things that really stood out to me was the fact that it had a very useable bridge pickup tone right out of the box. To my ears, and more importantly on my gear, the bridge pickup on any given strat is usually too trebly. The bridge position on this Strat is still glassy however not ear-piercingly trebly.
On the middle position, I was closer to the SRV sound than I ever got with other Strats. I was tuned to concert pitch with 0.010 gauge strings, so it was going to be a struggle to get extremely close to SRV land. But it's closer than I've ever gotten on my rig with other Strats, so that's a big plus for me.
I'll try and get some clips up in the coming weeks. The problem as I've discovered is that right now Wix does not let you add sound files into blog posts. So I'll have to find the time to convert sound files into video files.
Some pics:
Update 2018:
So it's been more than a year, and of course I haven't delivered what I promised (audio clips). I've got no excuses...
But, what I do have is a clip I recorded with the guitar that these pickups are installed in. It's not the best clip for a demo, I would prefer just some chords, single note lines, maybe some overdriven tones...but it's all I have now. I'll apologise in advance for the inaccurate playing and my attempt at finger picking:
As for my thoughts after one year with the product...I don't have any major complaints nor regrets when it comes to it. The neck pickup and the neck/middle combo are great, in my opinion. The bridge pickup is okay, I'm not a frequent user of the single bridge pickup anyway (mostly spent my time in the other 4 positions). They perform as expected and are no more noisier than my other strat pickups - they'll be staying in this guitar for the foreseeable future.