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My new guitar arrived today. It's a Squier Classic Vibe 70s HSS. I noticed some wires are showing at the side of one of the pickups. Is this something I should be concerned about?
Not sure I want to go through the hassle of getting it replaced as it seems it's out of stock now, and I've been waiting to get this guitar for a long time. I ordered it online.
I'd love some advice. I was thinking about using a pointy blunt object to push the wires in, but I don't want to ruin the guitar.
This is absolutely not a problem, unless you object to the cosmetic appearance.
Some pickups have that extra loop there to add extra relief to lower the risk of snapping the wires when removing/replacing pickups. If you pop the back off or remove strings and pop the pickup out, you may be able to reroute the wires if you want to.
Or you could get some black paint or a black marker pen and colour them :-)
Leave it alone - you'll probably break something.
They're meant to be like that.
Basically, that's where the coil wires are tagged onto the thicker wires needed to carry the signal off to the volume & tone pots. The short loops you can see are where the thicker wires are dropped through the pickup base to provide a stronger structure, strain relief when the pickups are handled.
Strat pickups, at their most basic, are… basic.
Sometimes they have covers, sometimes not. Yours don't, they're an open design.
On 'standard' single coil designs the tags are usually at the side, not the end, and are hidden by the scratch plate. On a covered humbucker design, they would be hidden by the cover. On an open design you can see them - though amusingly they always seem to be out of sight, round the corner, on advertising photos.
See this Guitar Centre page for just how many different variants there are.
Personally, seeing the wires wouldn't particularly concern me - other pics I can find online of similar models (1,2) seem to also show a cheeky bit of wire peeping out.
I was thinking about using a pointy blunt object to push the wires in
I wouldn't do that. If it's something that you find particularly offputting in terms of presentation, you might want to reconsider whether this is the guitar for you! Not all pickups have the wires visible in this way.
