Engineered to recreate the best features of classic Strat pickups without the noise.
The DiMarzio Area Strat Pickup set contains 3 well-designed pickups: the Area '58 (neck), the Area '67 (middle), and the Area '61 (bridge). Easy to install, they'll bring a collection of authentic tones to your Strat-style guitar while reducing noise.
The Area '58 (neck)
There are two major differences between a great vintage Strat pickup and an average one: treble response and dynamics. A great pickup is clear and bright, but not thin-sounding. A great one makes the sound jump out of the amp when you pick hard and drop way down when you play softly, and the tone varies when the string is picked at different spots. The best pickup DiMarzio ever heard like this was from 1958, and that's what inspired the Area 58, with two major differences. This pickup has way less magnet pull, and virtually no hum.
The Area 58 has obvious similarities to the Virtual Vintage 2.1 it replaces, but there are several non-visible performance factors that have changed. Dynamic range and string definition are greatly increased, leading to improvements in both clean chord-playing and overdriven soloing. The Area 58 is very sensitive to small height adjustment differences: close to the strings produces a fatter, slightly compressed blues tone and further away yields crystal clean sounds. The final improvement is in noise reduction. All of the Virtual Vintage pickups have better hum cancellation than full-size humbuckers. Area 58 and Area 61 are even quieter.
The Area '67 (middle)
The Monterey Pop Festival of 1967 was a watershed event in American music. When it was over, the world had heard and felt the sound of a Strat in the hands of a master. Single-coils in 1967 were bright and very clean. And, of course, they hummed. DiMarzio has captured the classic bright and clean sound but totally eliminated the hum with their patented Area technology. They've also reduced magnet pull by 40% for improved sustain and clarity. The Area 67 has the chime of 60s pickups, and the 2 and 4 positions are light, bright and quack-happy.
Strat pickups in the late 1960s used full-strength Alnico 5 magnets. The patented magnetic field of the Area models is more efficient and focused than it is on "true" single-coils, which allows us to use Alnico 2 instead. There's much less magnet pull, but no loss of output. This is a major advantage in the neck and middle positions, where sustain and intonation can both suffer if the strings are exposed to strong magnetic fields. In the bridge position, the patented technology of the Area 67 produces a sound that's very bright but not brittle.
The Area '61 (bridge)
DiMarzio has been working on serious vintage single-coil design with no hum for twelve years. Their goal has always been to capture the best qualities of pickups heard from the 1950s and early 60s. They played several pickups from the early 60s that had a unique tonality: they were steely, yet woody-sounding. Naturally, DiMarzio wanted to nail this sound, and wanted to do it with no hum and less magnet-pull. The Area 61 does it.
Over the last 10 years DiMarzio has gotten hundreds of requests from guitarists asking for the Texas blues sound. This sound is centered on single-coils from the early 1960's, but it's also based on heavy strings and strong hands. We can't change your strings or your hands, but the Area 61 captures the tonal bedrock this sound is based on. Like the Area 58, the Area 61 really responds to different pick attacks: played hard, it sounds louder and tougher than you'd expect from a vintage pickup, but it cleans up immediately by picking softer or rolling down the volume control. And like the Area 58, its ability to cancel hum is superior to full-size humbuckers.
