Description
Vintage Strat pickups are loved for two things: a treble that bites without turning brittle, and dynamics that let your playing dictate the tone. Pick hard and the sound leaps forward; back off and it settles into something soft and glassy, with the character shifting depending on exactly where you strike the string. DiMarzio chased that quality down to a specific pickup from 1958 and built the Area 58 around it — then fixed the two things that made those old units frustrating to actually gig with: heavy magnetic string pull and noticeable hum.
Compared to the Virtual Vintage 2.1 it succeeds, the Area 58 looks familiar but performs differently underneath. Dynamic range and note separation both got a real boost, which shows up whether you’re strumming clean chords or pushing into overdriven lead lines. It’s also unusually responsive to pickup height — set it close to the strings for a thicker, slightly compressed blues growl, or back it off for a cleaner, more crystalline sound. Alnico 2 magnets keep the low end rounded rather than aggressive, and DiMarzio’s hum-cancelling design puts it ahead of even full-size humbuckers for quiet operation — Area 58 and its sibling Area 61 are the quietest in the Virtual Vintage lineup.
Best suited to neck or middle position, though it holds up fine in the bridge too.
- Wiring: 4-conductor
- Magnet: Alnico 2
- Output: 125 mV
- DC Resistance: 6.15 kOhm
- Introduced: 2006
- Patents: 4,442,749 and 5,908,802
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