I've been searching for the right sound from my electric guitars for quite a while, and have tried various pickups from various manufacturers. In my experience, nobody *describes* their pickups better than DiMarzio; when I read a description of one of their pickups, it turns out sounding very much like I expect. Others seems less able to do that - Seymour Duncan has never matched my expectations, for instance.
For a bridge humbucker, I've become enthralled with the DiMarzio Fred and MoJo pickups. Their dual-resonance design gives me a bit richer palette of harmonics to work with, and although they're a little stronger than a standard PAF-style, it's not by much, and they're certainly not the heavy-handed super distortion style of pickup. They have a better tone, more balanced, to me. These are Satriani's pickups, but I use a different guitar, and they sound just they way I want them to.
For the middle, I'm using their Area '61 pickups. Sounds like a very slightly overwound Strat pickup, with no hum and much less string pull.
For the neck, I'm torn between a Carvin TBH-60 (a twin-blade humbucker in a single coil size), and a standard mini-humbucker (I fell in love with these in my old LP DeLuxe). They give me a sort of P-90 vibe (without the hum, of course), and when split, they cluck pretty good with the middle pickup.
However, I've also tried some of the overseas knockoffs, and some of those turned out surprisingly well. The Guitar Fetish brand (GFS) has a humbucker called the VEH (they say it means "vintage extra hot", but it's not that overwound, and what they were really going after was Van Halen's tone). That thing actually sounds pretty darn good (it's in a Parker P-38 right now). Their stacked humbucker (going after the Area series) wasn't done so well, however; weak, and a lot of magnet pull.
So what are you using? What are you looking for but not getting?
BTW, my other favourite? The GraphTech "Ghost"; they're piezos embedded in bridge saddles, and their system sounds more like an acoustic than others I've played, AND they don't break strings...
Bookmarks