When I was about thirteen I asked my brother to teach me how to play guitar. Part of his instructions included a list of guitarists to listen to for inspiration. Many of those guitarists are still favorites of mine to this day. Randy Rhoads, Paul Gilbert, Eddie Van Halen, Eric Johnson, Vernon Reid, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jake E. Lee, the list goes on and on. The one whose speed caught my attention the most at that age was Yngwie Malmsteen. After years of listening to Yngwie I had decided I needed to add a strat to my arsenal. Naturally I want an Yngwie strat, but that was, and still is, far beyond my realm of attainability.
This led to a pair of attempts at what I called Project YJM on a budget. I took any strat style guitar and tried to make it look and sound as close to a YJM strat as I possibly could. The key ingredient though has to be pickups. While I see a lot of people getting really close to Yngwie's tone with stock pickups, I felt my projected needed DiMarzios for authenticity. I eventually found an HS-3 in stock on Scamazon, so I bought it. When it arrived I couldn't have been happier. My banana yellow partscaster was finally ready to have its day as my YJM strat clone. Once the pickup was installed I noticed two things; firstly this pickup was microphonic, like REALLY microphonic. Secondly I noticed just how weak the pickup was. I knew it was a low output pickup, but I didn't know it was this low output.
To say the least, I hate this pickup. I thought I knew what I was getting into when I bought it, but apparently I didn't. Unless you have another HS-3 or HS-4 in the other positions it's impossible to match the volume and gain. Currently my project YJM strat has a cheap unknown brand single coil in the neck and the HS-3 in the bridge. I can't lower the neck pickup enough, nor raise the HS-3 enough to get them to match. It's such a weak pickup. I understand the concept behind it; allow the preamp and amp to do the overdrive, not the pickup, but I honestly think a pickup's contribution to the overdrive is part of the whole package. Sure, Yngwie's tone sounds great, but this pickup just doesn't appeal to me. Not anymore.
Another of my favorite guitarists, Jero Ramiro, plays what appears to be a YJM strat, and it sounds like a YJM strat, but every thing I can find says he's not using the HS-3, and I can see why. I hate to dump on this pickup, but I just can't see why this pickup costs as much as most other strat pickups and does far, far less, and even then it's less than that.
I did search around as to why this HS-3 was microphonic the word "fake" was floated around in a few places. The reality being I don't think anyone could possibly fake such a low output pickup. You have to plan to fail as badly as the HS-3 fails, you can't fail this badly on accident. I contacted DiMarzio and they said to send it to them for potting. This was during the pandemic, so that was an impossibility, and thus this pickup is what it is. And certainly at some point this pickup won't be in this guitar anymore.
If you're considering a DiMarzio HS-3, try to find someone who has one, or try a guitar store that has something with one installed already in stock. It might be your dream pickup, but for me it just fails on every level except for the fact it's kind of got me addicted to humbucking single coil pickups. That is this pickups one singular saving grace. I guess.
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