HERE COMES a nice shiny turquoise guitar with "Fernandes" written on the head. Made In Japan, it says on the back. It's got six strings and three pickups and three knobs and a tremolo arm and a five-way selector switch and it looks very much like a guitar that used to be made by an American company called Fender. Nice maple neck with nice rosewood fingerboard with skinny little frets. Nice guitar. Feels sort of... nice. Which isn't a criticism.

Ignore the guitar. Look at the pickups. Little black plastic-dad objects without visible polepieces sticking up, but with initials writ small on the bottom right edge (looking up the neck). They say EMG. Who he?

EMG is an American firm which seems to have donned the yellow jersey in the Tour De Pickups, hotly pursued by challengers like Seymour Duncan.

The current vogue in replacement pickups seems to be away from the multi-megaton output of the early Di Marzio style coils and towards more reasonable volume levels with wider and more useable frequency response. These pickups can help exploit the natural tonal qualities of the guitar, making any instrument sound better. A good instrument, therefore, should sound great.

Which is where Signor Fernandes and his Japanese guitar come in. Not being best acquainted with other examples of Iberian/Nipponese luthiery, it's hard to tell quite how much the addition of three EMG-S series single coils, plus a Resonant Peak Control potentiometer, has changed the natural characteristics of the guitar. But whatever it was like before, it sounds wonderful now.

Before we deal with that tricky little Resonant Peak Control lurking cunningly disguised as a tone knob on the lower reaches of the scratchplate, we should say a brief word about the EMG-S Series pickups. These sealed units have an independent pre-amp each, which generates electronically a humbucking effect. This makes the S Series cleaner than standard single coil pickups, and also helps account for the extraordinary clarity of the sound — that bell-like cleanness that makes every note in a chord stand out.

It's started — "bell-like". Reviewing pickups is very much a matter of playing Hunt The Adjective. So, moving from the neck pickup back, here we go: front position — chiming, clangorous (when you hit the treble strings hard), resonant, plangent; front/middle — pinched, middly, singing, Knopfler; middle — bright, hard, full, strident, reverberant, good; middle/back — piquant, nasal, resonant, Knopfler; back — harsh, cutting, sibilant, blue...

But then we come to the Resonant Peak Controller. Think of it as a sort of treble boost, an intensifier (like the "in-" in front of "flammable", which makes the guitar more likely to catch fire). Tweak the RPC up from zero, and the sound does seem to catch fire, with the harmonics in each note suddenly growing, stretching the sustain, making everything just... MORE. It's a bit like Martin Barre's solo on "Aqualung" by Jethro Tull, if you remember that from your dad's collection.

On the front pickup, the RPC does tend to bleed bass sounds, but this is a small price to pay for the additional overtones gained in the higher frequencies. The middle setting, often overlooked on Strats, now leaps out of the amp with new-found power and vigour. As for the bridge pickup — it's sharp to the threshold of pain. Yowza.

Now that we come to mention small prices to pay, the basic S Series EMG pickups — which come fitted and wired up to tone and volume pots and jack socket (now there's a smart idea), ready for almost instant installation into your scratchplate — should cost around £200. The Resonant Peak Control, which completely takes the place of the second Strat tone control, costs around £70.

All too often, reviewers crap on about how wonderful equipment is, and how they were so impressed they actually bought one (copyright Victor 'Remington' Kayam). Sometimes it's true. In this case, it is almost — I'd buy this set-up for my Strat if I could afford it. If you can, do. Now there's a philosophy for life.

EMG RPC pickups: £269

CONTACT: Rhino Music Spares, Burnham Road, Dartford, Kent DA9 SBN. Tel: 0322 77321