as Vintage Noiseless™ were original equipment on the Fender American Deluxe Series Stratocasters made between 1998 and 2003. They are now widely used on many Fender guitars made in their Ensenada, Mexico facility (so-called "Made in Mexico", or "MIM" guitars) and Fender Custom Shop guitars, and have been the stock pickups on the Eric Clapton Stratocaster signature model since 2001. Vintage Noiseless pickups and are still sold by Fender. Vintage Noiseless pickups use Alnico II magnets. These pickups were the result of three years of research aimed at combining the advantages of single coils with those of humbuckers: the characteristic sound of the former and the silence of the latter. Fender's intent was to develop a pickup that could evoke the vintage Stratocaster sound and the silence of Lace Sensor pickups. The Stratocaster version is identified by the word "Noiseless" in gold cursive on the aged white or black pickup covers and the use of staggered pole pieces. The Stratocaster set of Vintage Noiseless pickups comes packaged with two 1MΩ potentiometers ("pots") and a .022µF capacitor for tone controls, one 500kΩ pot for volume control, a 680pF capacitor and a 220kΩ resistor for a treble bleed circuit, and a wiring diagram. Vintage Noiseless pickup sets are also available for the Telecaster and Jazz Bass. Features include: PolySol-coated magnet wire Staggered, hand-beveled pole pieces Alnico II magnets Fiber bobbin Vinyl-coated output wire Neck/Middle/Bridge output: 9.8kΩ Neck/Middle/Bridge Inductance: 3.0 Henries Samarium Cobalt Noiseless (SCN) The Samarium Cobalt Noiseless (SCN) series was a subsequent line of stacked electric guitar and bass pickups; these were designed by Bill Lawrence with the goal of further reducing noise while improving the "single coil" tone of the pickup and were fine tuned by Fender. Introduced in 2004, they were similar to the Vintage Noiseless pickups, but Lawrence's research into controlling magnetic eddy currents led him to employ miniaturized samarium cobalt alloy magnets instead of Alnico V. Samarium cobalt is a rare earth magnet that is more powerful than the Alnico V magnets traditionally used in pickup design. The SCN pickups were a standard equipment feature on the American Deluxe series Stratocaster from 2004 to 2010, and were available for the Telecaster and Jazz Bass, but are no longer manufactured by Fender. The earliest Stratocaster SCN pickups had no external marking; later models had the SCN logo lightly stamped on the bottom right corner of the pickup covers,