Lollar has got something special for Stratocaster owners looking for a tone pick me up for their guitar, and even in a world in which there are countless aftermarket electric guitar pickup options for the Strat in your life, the Tacoma, Washington-based company’s Super-Caster set might just be something different.
If you were in Anaheim this winter you might have seen these already. Lollar was showing them off at NAMM, attraction plenty of attention from the likes of Mateus Asato. For a start, they don’t look anything like your typical aftermarket Strat set. Lollar is housing these in an open-topped metal ring, and has given them a sort of gold-top vibe courtesy of a brash mesh insert.
There is something kind of Coodercaster about the Super-Caster pickups and we we are very much there for that – and for all that these are really quite different, they’ll occupy the same footprint as a regular Strat single-coil.
The Super-Casters are designed around Lollar’s “Broiler” pole pieces, which are larger and longer. Lollar says its unique wind will give you a “punchy, present sound” with more output, and altogether a bit more meat on the bones.
But it depends where your five-way pickup switch is sitting. That middle position is underwound for more clarity and definition, and that “classic chime and glassy Strat ‘quack’” that works so well on its own and mixes up nicely when combined with the neck or bridge pickup for those in-between tones. You know the ones, playing triads and rhythm-lead through a tube amp just on the edge of break-up, they'll give you John Mayer guitar face.
Kevin Moe, production manager at Lollar, says the Super-Caster started out as an experiment in trying to make a humbucker. It wasn’t working for him but when transferred the idea of a single-coil platform, stacking the two coils to make “basically one big magnet” suddenly they had something promising to work with, and it sounded good when they stuck it on an electric guitar.
“It was pretty clear when we put it in a guitar that the thing just lit up and we had something on our hands,” he says. “The coil itself is fairly similar to a lot of other Strat designs that we make but the magnets really set it apart. It’s a really large diameter. It is a taller magnet, so that gives it a distinctly different sound.”
The Super-Caster pickups are available individually ($135, gold $145) or as a set (from $405), and you can choose from chrome, nickel and gold rings.
The DC resistances read “Neck 5.8K, Middle 5.4K, and Bridge 6.2K” but don’t read too much into that, says Lollar. These are “loud and proud”. Check ‘em out over at Lollar Pickups.
