Due to some savvy marketers at Fender Guitars, and sporadic videos and pics, there is some vaguely accurate information available about Jimi's '68 White Woodstock Stratocaster and his "Black Beauty" maple neck Strat also said to be a '68, but nothing with absolutely verifiable accuracy. Those guitars had a different sound altogether from his earlier rosewood neck period. To add to the mystique, of the hundreds of guitars Jimi bought, it's said that only 7 are known to exist today and nobody who owns one will verify precisely what's under the hood. So basically, Fender's answer to this was to create several variations of Jimi's guitars, naming then everything from the Voodoo Strat to the Woodstock Strat to the custom shop '69 Strat to Japanese made lefty '66 Strat to their Custom Shop '69 pickups saying it gives the sound of the 'Summer of Love" I guess meaning Woodstock? Duh. Monterey was in '67 and was dubbed the "Summer of Love", not Woodstock! If anything, Woodstock was the death of Flower Power-Free Love period. In addition, if they were supposed to model Jimi's Woodstock tone, why wouldn't they be called custom '68s since the white Strat he played the Star Spangle Banner on was a '68 model, not a '69 and if the custom '69s were modeled after Monterey, why wouldn't they have named them custom '67s or to be more accurate to what Jimi used at Monterey, Custom '65s? This confusion set me out on a quest to find out the truth about what's real and what's really just marketing hype. Incidentally, none of the Hendrix Stratocasters were exactly like the kind Jimi played, either because of differences in pickups, neck types, logo types, body woods, or other parts. It's almost as if Fender purposely made them to be mutations to keep us all craving the real deal. Back to my research findings...

First, I discovered through some seriously deep digging over a long period or time, that Jimi used a '65 Strat to record "Hey Joe", "Purple Haze" and "Electric Ladyland" (see below provenance) and that both the Black and Fiesta Red Strats he played at Monterey were 1965 Stratocasters. It's astonishing to me with Jimi Hendrix, being the quintessential rock guitarist of all time, that there's so little information available about the gear he used to stun the world with at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 (which is considered by many historians to be the most important show in rock history). Or that the gear he used during his most fertile recording to record his debut album "Are You Experienced?" & "Electric Ladyland" to get those beautiful sounds that nobody has been able to be replicate with exactness to this day. Can't you just hear the tone of that Fiestas Red Strat wailing and groaning on the intro to "Wild Thing" and wonder what kind of equipment he was using? Sure, some will say, tone is in the mind and the fingers of the player who played it. Or that, "He's just Jimi stupid"!  Or the other theory, that his brilliant recording engineer Eddie Kramer worked some studio magic which I'm sure he did. All that stuff is true to some degree AND to me, those are all blanket statements people use that I just don't buy as the consummate answer to my burning question which is and always will be "how did Jimi get those types of sounds?" These kind of generalized answers I usually get are usually from those whose egos many times play a part in the answer which only further distorts the truth. It's like saying... here we have that the world's most delicious tasting cake, made by the world's greatest baker. Now since he IS the world's greatest baker, gosh he could have used stale flour and rotten eggs and would still able to get that same delicious tasting cake because after all, he's the world's greatest baker right? Nah uh... To make that cake you better know the exact ingredients, their quality, age, syntax (or order) of how the ingredients are placed into the mixing bowl before placing it in the oven and at what temperature? Can this cake be replicated? Absolutely! Can Jimi's tone be replicated? I say absolutely! Provided, of course, that you have all the ingredients! I found a couple of them I believe. Now, I'm not talking about is playing techniques. That's another story altogether, but for example when he hits a basic chord such as he did while playing "Like A Rolling Stone" that sound can be replicated in my opinion. So if your desire is to model Jimi's tone and then build on your own style from there, I see nothing wrong with that and Jimi, more than anyone borrowed quite a few styles and licks from his favorite players.

Back to the Custom '65 pickups and how I believe they are one of the crucial ingredients to nailing Jimi's '65 Monterey piano like tone Jimi had and "why" do they sound markedly different than any other Strat that nobody online at least to my knowledge seems to have put 2+2 together yet. Anyway I landed a set of those pickups taken from a '65 relic Strat (never mind the cost) and posted some basic clips below. Don't mind the playing. I was trying to emphasize the differences in tone between a set of custom shop '60s pickups and the custom '65s. The CS '60s were out of a ''60s relic noneck Strat from The Zoo. After the clips were made, I carefully removed them and installed the custom '65 pickups into that same guitar so there would be no variances of wood types etc.. I used identical volume, tone, amp settings on a Dr Z Route 66 amp based on Jimi's first JTM 45 with the warm sounding big bottle KT66 power tubes.