Turn up your Strat (or any guitar equipped with standard single coil pickups) and you get a certain amount of hum and buzz, especially if you are playing under fluorescent lights or near any device that creates a strong electromagnetic field. If you find this sound hideously irritating, as many do, you might consider a guitar with humbucking pickups. That's the extreme alternative. You get rid of the hum problem, but you also get rid of that twangy, out-of-phase tone that single coils get. The classic "Fender tone", as it has been described.

One way to beat the problem (still fairly radical) is to go active. With an active preamp system in your guitar and a set of pickups such as Duncan Live Wires, you can cure the problem.

But there is yet another solution, short of trading in your guitar or routing it out to make room for humbuckers or active electronics. There is a group of pickups designed to be hum-canceling or "bucking", but still retain the essential single-coil sound. Seymour Duncan makes several. The Classic Stack has the dual coils of a humbucker, but they are stacked so that the pickup has the dimensions of a single coil. It also retains the sound of a single coil, without the hum. Their Vintage Rails pickup is another that accomplishes the same mission, single coil sound without the hum. Another pickup that is growing in popularity is the DiMarzio Virtual Vintage.

Fender also has several new designs that you can use as pop-in replacements for your Strat. These are Lace Sensors and Vintage Noiseless. Most of the Lace Sensors get a humbucker sound, but the Gold is designed for vintage tone: a glassy, bell-like sound with crisp highs. Even closer in tone to your vintage single coils are Fenders new Vintage Noiseless pickups. In this case, Fender's noiseless technology has very successfully minimized the noise while retaining the tone.