I understand that there are several ways to reduce hum in guitars with single coil pickups and I am left wondering, if that is the case, why would any guitar come with hum-vulnerable pickups (keeping the cost down maybe??). So anyway, I have a few questions.[br] [br]Do Strats (player level or above) come standard with hum canceling pickups? Does the hum canceling require using two coils at once (e.g., neck and middle) and if so, do you then lose the distinctive Strat sound. I’ve never heard anyone say that you do lose that sound intuitively, based on my tech-naïve understanding, using two single coils w/one RWRP is just re-creating a humbucker but with the 2 coils a bit further apart…so why wouldn’t you get more of a humbucker sound than a single coil sound?[br] [br]Maybe stacked coils the best way to go. Is the bottom coil of such a system basically inactive w/regards to picking up the string signal, so that it doesn’t have the tonal qualities of a humbucker since the signal is only coming through one coil? Maybe the problem is best addressed by a noise gate rather than some fancy pickup technology? I guess I’m just a bit lost in the various means to eliminate hum and am wondering which methods best preserve the single coil sound.

Thanks,

Dave