Wilde USA L-280

UPDATE

Oh by the way, I originally bought a 298 for the bridge pickup but was not happy with it. It sounded too much like a humbucker to me. Way too fat. I called Mrs. L and told her about my dilemma. She told be to mail it in and that she would send a 280 as a replacement. This is exactly how it turned out. This was about 6 months after the original shipment. I couldn't be more happier with the customer service. Make sure you call. Forget about email. These folks are seniors after all :)

Custom Strat with Ash body and fat neck.
Tweed Champ amp in 12" Cab

I ordered the 280's about 2 years ago. Mrs L. was very helpful and friendly and assured me that the shipment to Canada would be painless. I replaced a set of Custom Shop 69's because I could not dial out the ice pick highs no matter how low I set the treble on my GE-7 EQ. Second, they were quite noisy. I felt confident that since I have a modded GE-7 EQ with quality parts, that I could dial in any sound that I wanted. This is exactly what I experienced. I was agonizing over whether or not I wanted the L-200 but I went for the 280's because they respond better to EQ and are more flexible. I am not sure if the 200's sound more stratty or if I would be more happy with them but I am confident that I have dialed in a sound with my 280's that I will be sticking with for a long time.

Some have complained that these Pup's sound sterile or not stratty. My suggestion is to pick up a GE-7. All you have to do is scoop the lower mids and boost the top three bands on the EQ to achieve an amazingly hollow, treblely, and yes, "stratty" sound. I can't tell you how much more tone I get from these than the CS 69's that went out. I use my tweed champ to play clean with a little compression with just the EQ and a Reverb-mate Sole-mate box. Even with this basic setup, the 69's sounded like nails on the chalkboard to me.

The 280's also handle all manner of effects with ease (distortion, delay etc). I cannot stress enough that for my personal tastes, I could not dial in the tone that I wanted without the Boss GE-7. Buyer be ware and do not blame the pickups. They are designed for the express reason to have flat frequency response which can be easily tweaked to taste with proper EQ'ing. Ultimately I have achieved the essential characteristics of a single coil, and in a way what the 69's tried to do with the scooped mids, without all of the negatives.

The Pup's truly are state of the art, and are designed for TODAY's players. Folks, get the word "vintage" out of your heads, and take control of your own tone shaping with equipment designed for today.

I would buy these again and I would love to hear the 200's one day just for fun.

Single Coil noiseless pickups. Strat style.

Installed it on a Strat clone I assembled.
I installed a set Bridge, Middle and Neck.

Using them with a Vox Valvetronix 30 watt amp.
The tone is very very clear and well balanced from string to string.
I'm just a recreational player that is trying to learn blues. These pickups are great for blues. They don't have that ice pick highs that some Strats have. Sustain is very good and the pickups are very touch sensitive. I am very impressed with the string balance. My son plays metal on a Traynor YCS-50 amp. He's tried this guitar with the Wilde pickups and they did a very credible job. They don't have the output of a hot humbucker but with a high gain amp it doesn't really matter. The note clarity is clearer than the humbucker equipped guitars that we have.

Yes if it were destroyed I would definitely purchase them again.
I've had an acoustic guitar for 20 years that I rarelyplayed. It's a Yamaha FG-375s (another great piece of gear) but in the last year I've been trying to learn so I purchased a Yamaha AEX-520 off of E-bay. I decided to build the Strat last year. I ran across the Wilde pickups on the Internet and bought a set for the Strat. Very good value. In fact I am going to copy the AEX which is a hollow body and try to build a guitar from scratch. I was so impressed with the L280's that I purchased a set of NOS Mini humbuckers made by the same company years ago to fit in the AEX copy.