Gonna ditch SD JB for EMG Pickups

[Gr8Scott]

I have a homebuilt guitar that I love to play that has a bad sounding bridge pickup. The body is mahogany and the neck is maple with an ebony fretboard. I have a SD JB in the bridge slot and it is very tinny and just plain awful sounding. Since I homebuilt this rig, the sheilding is a bit less than perfect, but the neck is so good that I wouldn't want to use another guitar. I've been thinking about getting some EMG pickups pre-assembled on a strat pickguard (this is a strat body with pickguard). I've done some reading and I think this would help solve my noise/sheilding problem and it would also hopefully give me a more rounded sound. If I do this, I have been thinking of getting the SV pickups for the neck and mid and then go for an 89 on the bridge. I don't normally use the single coil at the bridge primarily because of the hum, but I have played a guitar with a seymore duncan single coil distortion pickup that was awfully nice and actually had a better tone than my dimarzio distortion did on my HM strat. My current singles aren't bad, but if I'm gonna go active I might as well go all the way. I've been thinking about getting the extra bells and whistles on the package and get the EXG and SPC instead of tone knobs. Thing is that I like to roll the tone back on my neck pickup and get that fuzz tone bluesy distortion and play with that, so giving up a master tone knob will hurt a little. I've also been thinking of getting a PI2 phase reversal switch for the mid pickup to get the classic strat reverse wind pickup sound that I love. I think that standard issue EMG strat pickups don't have this kind of setup and the phase reversal switch is necessary to get that kind of sound from an EMG, but I could be wrong.

I play mainly metal and blues. Would this setup I mentioned help my current tone problem or would I be better suited to go with something else? I plan to do a little home recording with this rig, so whatever it is it will have to be as noise free as possible. I'm looking for a good distorted sound on the bridge and a good clean and glassy sound on the mid and neck. Any advice will be deeply appreciated.

 

[flash2ace]

i just gott my texas specials for my mexican strat and they scream big time and have such a fat tone that i love them.
that was a great investment,im running 13 gauge strings on it and they sound so good that its worth the sore fingers.and heck if i ever switch back to 10s itll feel like nothing at all.i wouldnt say that they have a good metal sound but i use my ibanez rg570 for any metal i play. but if your gonna go with actives you might as well forget about noiseless because actives from my experiance are anything but noiseless. i dont like actives at all because they add boost but they rob natural tone imho. my friend has emg actives in his strat and it is noisy as heck when we try and record with it. its uo to you but im telling you i realy like the texas specials. have fun shoping.

 

[Clive Hugh]

I went that route several years ago but found the EMG's were too glassy and went back to my strat's originals, different horses for different courses.

 

[Gr8Scott]

I was playing the guitar last night without an amp or anything plugged into it. The guitar sounds so balanced unplugged that it almost seems impossible that the bridge pickup is so stinking tinny. I looked on the web at the Seymore Duncan site and checked out the stats and I think I understand why now. It seems that the EQ description of the JB shows lots of highs and low mids and moderate bass. This is pretty much how it sounds to me. It is WAY too bright. If there were some midrange in there to balance out the highs a little, it would be a good pickup. The way things stand, it looks as if I'm leaning toward the Seymore Duncan Distortion TB-6. It has about the same highs as the JB, but there are much more mids and lows to balance things out. The mid and neck pickups might get switched out for some cool rails later too. I played a guitar with a set of them on it and they blew me away. Those cool rails had the smoothest tone I've heard on a guitar. I can probably slap on some better sheilding while I have the pickguard off and I would be set from a noise standpoint as well.

One of the reasons I was thinking of going to an active setup was to possibly tone down a wood combination that might have been too bright. Now that I look at the specs and info on the JB, I think the problem lies with my initial pickup selection more than anything else.