Single Tui hot Strat NZ$139 for NZ customers, if you’re overseas it’s GST free; $120.87

Set Tui hot Strat NZ$375 for NZ customers, if you’re overseas they’re GST free; $326.09

AlnicoV – Neck 6.73KOhms, 3.22H, Middle 6.73 KOhms, 3.22H, Bridge 7.12 KOhms, 3.51H.

The The Tui hot Strat set is designed for players wanting a little more from their Strat. A full sounding set suited best to blues and rock players. It will clean up with the best of them but is at its happiest playing dirty blues – think SRV and you’re getting there. Not only that, it’s the perfect Strat pickup for that Dave Gilmour tone.

They make a great neck and middle pickup as part of a HSS set with an Integrity or Cloud Nine bridge humbucker.

Full sounding and clear with a steel base plate to add that extra little push.

Dave Gilmour tone

In August of 2025 I went to see a set of my Tui pickups in action performing Pink Floyd. It was at the Civic Theater in Auckland. The lead guitarist was Brett Adams. He contacted me a couple of weeks before asking which of my pickups would give that Dave Gilmour tone. So I sent him some Tui. This is just recorded using my phone but I think you’ll agree they sound pretty special through a big PA.

It was quite an emotional experience for me.

Here’s some more Tui goodness, this time in a HSS configuration with a Cloud Nine humbucker.

And in HSS with an ‘Integrity’ humbucker. The Tui is the single coil I recommend with HSS sets, they work so well with that bridge humbucker.

I received this unexpected video from a customer:

What’s different about the Tui?

Here’s a video I made (with help from the dogs) to explain how the steel base plate adds to the bottom end of these pickups. It just gives that little extra push that I feel these pickups need.

The Tui hot Strat set story

The Tui hot Strat set is a step up in power from my Bellbird and Kokako sets while still retaining the character of the Stratocaster. This set is best suited to Blues/Rock players who like a bit of dirt. There’s more bottom end and smoother highs. It’s very well suited to HSS set ups alongside my Integrity or Cloud Nine humbuckers.

I’ve wound a lot of Strat pickups since I started in 1995. I started off re-winding cheap pickups and then moved on to repairing old dead Fender pickups. Every experiment was written down in a notebook with tone comments.

Back when I started there wasn’t much information available so there was a lot of reverse engineering and a lot of trying things out. That learning time was invaluable to developing instinct for how to change the sound of a pickup. I’ve still got the note book and I’m still adding to it.

In, I think, 2014 a customer of mine approached me wanting a set of Stratocaster pickups. He’s a great blues player and had recently moved from using a Les Paul to a Strat. He described the sound he was after and it seemed to me it was the same as I’d been after myself so I put some time in to designing a pickup set for him.

The Tui hot Strat needed to be most definitely a Strat sound. I hear plenty of Strat replacement pickups that are fine but just not Strat-ish enough. Secondly, I wanted a bit more power, just a bit, enough to make a good old valve amp clip a bit easier than a “vintage” pickup would. And there needed to be dynamics – tickle it and it’s clean, dig in and it grits up.

As I was making the original version of this set for a player used to humbuckers I wanted to reduce the ”ping” of the attack. I’ve added steel base plated as standard to this set. This changes the shape of the magnetic field, broadening the harmonic window. They add a wee bit of power, a wee bit of bass and reduce that pesky ping.

The neck pickup needed to have “that” Strat sound with fullness and clarity. It’s the ‘go to’ sound for most Strat players. The middle pickup needed to have some ‘quack’ to it with its own distinctive personality.

The bridge pickup shouldn’t be too thin, it needs to have plenty of highs but not too much of that ‘ping’ or it’s almost useless. Then there are the other sounds – positions 2 and 4, mistakenly referred to as ‘out of phase’. They are really just 2 pickups in parallel. It’s hard to predict what those sounds will be, there was a lot of experimenting.

So I consulted my old note book and wound a lot of pickups and fitted them in a few test Strats. I’ve been lucky enough to have some great players as repair customers and so I was able to get quite a few opinions.

Eventually I was happy and I fitted a set for my ex Les Paul customer and he loved them straight away. A few months later he contacted me to say he was still loving them. It’s great when players do that.

I’ve fitted Tui hot Strat sets into a lot of instruments and it turns out that not only blues players like them, they seem to work for everyone. I shouldn’t be surprised, the Stratocaster is such a versatile guitar, of course they do.

Further experiments have shown the Tui hot Strat pickups balance really well as part of a HSS set with either my Integrity or Cloud Nine humbuckers in the bridge position.

I agonised for months over names for my Strat pickup sets. Then, during a camping trip to Tauwharanui Regional Park, I heard my first Bellbird. The comparison in tone between the Bellbird and the more common Tui seemed exactly what I had in my head when designing my Strat pickups.

The Tui has turned out to be my best selling Stratocaster pickup. It appears there are a lot of players out there wanting a bit extra from their Strats without losing the character we all love.