I wonder becasue a strat the pickup is mounted on plastic...

I have wondered about this also..But the pickup is a microphone and it "picks up" what it heres. I once read the best way to check a guitar to start is to play it unplugged if it sounds full and toneful it will only get better when amped up. The pickups the can be good or better also

I dont know...I have had guitars that I changed PUs and they just made the guitar and then I had guitars like old Ibanez Artist bursts that it didnt do anything. so Im confused on this issue also

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Originally posted by chichi:
I wonder becasue a strat the pickup is mounted on plastic...

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It's both, but most important is the guitar. It all starts with the guitar. If you have a good guitar with crappy pickups, you can get good pickups and the guitar will sound good. If you have a crappy guitar, you won't get a good sound even with good pickups (except if your David Gilmour, he can make anything sound good)
You want to have the right combination of woods in your guitar (maple, mahogany, alder, ash, etc), since each wood has its own tonal characteristics, and choose pickups that go well with that wood for the particular sound (or sounds) you're trying to get (this goes from choosing single coils or humbuckers, or both, to choosing a particular pickup in these categories). Even the plastic pickguard has an effect on your overal tone.
This is a simplistic overview, but hopefuly you'll find it useful.
It is an art, and some people have a gift for knowing how to combine the different elements to get a great sounding guitar (I am not one of them).

I strongly disagree. Wood is way over-rated. Tone is nearly 100% dependent of the type of pickups, strings and amplifier you are using. If you are using an acoustic guitar, then yes, wood is very crucial. But guitar pickups do not "hear" different types of wood, they only react to the vibrations of the strings. It is true that a denser wood is likely to allow a vibrating string to sustain longer (and this effects the tone), but this increase in sustain is slight and it could be argued that the effect is mostly psychological (the player can feel the vibrations of the wood against his body while he plays.

When it comes to pickups, you usually get what you pay for, but sometimes companies like Gibson sell over-priced pickups that really aren't that good. Check reviews.

As for strings, it is more important to keep a set of fresh strings on your guitar than to worry about the manufacturer of the strings. Your much better off replacing cheap strings weekly than expensive strings every other week. Still, not all strings are created equal. Strings go bad fast, they need to be replaced as often as possible, which is usually dependent on money/time.

As for your amplifier, you MUST use a tube amp and it should have a quality speaker in it.

Trust me, these three things are WAY more important than the wood your guitar is made of.

There is one aspect of your guitar's build that does matter that is the quality of the neck/fretboard. A cheap guitar's biggest downfall, besides crappy pickups is a crappy neck/fretboard.

So YES you can replace crappy pickups with good pickups in a crappy guitar and get a much better tone. But you still may have a problem with the neck feeling difficult.

Check this article out, very informative: http://www.guitarplayer.com/archive/gear/solidbdy.shtml

By the way, wood definitely DOES matter, a solid guitar still has an acoustic voice, and this has nothing to do with the pickups.

I strongly agree that wood DOES matter. I think everything matters.

A friend of mine had a cheap Ibanez with basswood body that he put SD '59 and JB pickups in. It didn't sound bad, but didn't sound good and had no sustain whatsoever.

He ordered a alder Warmoth body and maple neck and used all of the hardware and pickups form the Ibanez. The guitar sounded 100% better and sustained pretty well.

I've even noticed changes in tone and sustain after changing tuners on my Les Paul!

Thanks for the link. Here are two more links related to wood. http://www.melanconguitars.com/tone.html http://www.andersonguitars.com/toneLibInfo.html
And remember, wood DOES matter

Yup. Wood matters.

You should hear the night-and-day difference between my two strats:

#1: ("Pink") 60's Reissue MIJ, thin neck, rosewood fretboard, light (basswood? poplar?) body. Pickups: Lindy Fralin Vintage Hots.

#2: Warmoth heavy ash body, Warmoth Birdseye Maple (boatback profile) neck. Pickups: Bill Lawrence L280's.

Strat #1 is dark and warm, a bit hollow, not much sustain.

Strat #2 is bright, in-your-face, almost ice-pick-in-the-ears, compared to Strat #1, with hot harmonics, very twangy even on the neck pickup.

I've talked to other Bill Lawrence pickup users, and they say it's not the pickups that are causing so much brightness; they just pick up what they hear. Really, they are not high output pickups--about the same as vintage Fender single coils; just very clear and well balanced. And the Fralins are modeled after vintage Fender single coils too, with normal output except for the hotter bridge.

Saying that wood doesn't matter is ridiculous. Try making a guitar out of Play-Doh, then, if wood doesn't matter.

I've also found that sustain is not created by just using more substantial or harder woods. Lighter wood can actually give more sustain; it just depends on the resonant quality of the wood, not the hardness or heaviness or thickness.

The pickups might not directly "hear" the wood, but the way the strings vibrate and sustain is directly related to all things wood and hardware related (bridge, nut, tuners, string length, neck profile, body shape, different woods, construction methods, etc., etc.). I can tell if a guitar is going to sound crappy by playing it unplugged. If the strings make a "boing"-y sound, it's crap. That means there's either plywood or something else crappy in the body.