Solid pickup with a typical telecaster neck tone. Slightly warmer than a standard American telecaster neck pickup, due to slightly lower highs, sounds slightly smoothed out in that area, its still bright though. The added benefit is that it is noise cancelling so it can handle a ton of gain. It can get muddy though with too much gain though because of it being a neck and single coil. My guitar has a swamp-ash body, maple cap/top and maple neck. So the guitar has a naturally bright tonal quality about it. So for me this made the most sense, to just avoid the 'ice pick' tone whilst also remaining bright.