Moving to passive pickups
Moving to passive pickups
Hi, I know this question gets asked a lot around here but I am looking for some advice around passive pickups. All of the guitars I currently have use different combos of EMGs (81/81, 81/85, 60/85) and I like the sounds I am getting from them but I would also like a bit more versatility and perhaps more organic tone. The SD 59/JB combo seems to be one of the more popular around, but I also have heard good things about the bare knuckle pickups. I should be able to try out the SDs somewhere but I don't know anywhere that I could test other pickups so thats why I thought I would ask for advice here.
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I play high gain stuff. I've always used passive pickups. I used to use really hot pickups (Dimarzio Super 3), but I've recently done a pickup shootout and found that I like the mid-gain Seymour Duncan Parallel Axis Blues Saraceno model. Yeah, the ugly square-ish one with the weird rectangular pole pieces.
Why? I was lacking definition while playing chords and using my fingers to play little melodies over it. The Parallel Axis was really balanced and none of the strings seemed to drown each other out the way the Super 3 did. It also sounds better clean.
I specifically bought a Seymour Duncan JB for the test because I thought it would be the best. I was wrong.
The pickups I tested:
Seymour Duncan JB
Seymour Duncan Blues Saraceno
ESP humbucker (the stock 2 conductor one that came in my Horizon)
Dimarzio Super 3
The pickups were put in 3 identical Horizons and all pickups were recorded clean and dirty playing the same parts of the same song. I then A/Bed them.
The JB was better clean than the Dimarzio, but when distorted, you couldn't tell them apart very much. At least not with my mix.