I'm asking for advice on this forum because this seems to be the meeting ground for displaced shredders.
Just purchased a nice Hamer guitar. Not a JEM, but looks and feels a lot like a high end Ibanez.
Mahogany body, 24 fret maple/rosewood neck, H-S-H, and a Floyd. It's one of the most comfortable guitars I've ever touched, and has that cool resonant thing happening when you play it unplugged. Then there's the bad news--the guitar was built with a Sustainer, but the previous owner ripped that out and put in a couple of Jackson humbuckers that sound like a turd flopping around in the bowl. So...what pickups should I buy?
I have another mahogany bodied strat with a Tom Anderson H3 in the bridge that sounds very "Euro-metal". It's a cool tone, but I don't want this guitar to be that dark and bass heavy. *I want more of a midrangy 80s sound from the bridge...sort of what a JB would do, but with better note definition for rhythm. I'd also like the
bridge pickup to clean up reasonably well, which excludes the "distortion" models, right? *From the neck, I want a throatier, more expressive version of the PAF Pro. Visions of Satriani lead tones are dancing in my head. I want the single coil to mix with either of the humbuckers to make glassier sounds (not necessarily strat-like) without any additional noise.
Would any of the following do what I'm thinking in this guitar?
Neck: Breed or FRED
Middle: Blue Velvet or Fast Track 1
Bridge: Steve's Special or Tone Zone
The last time I tried to replace the pickups in a guitar, I scored 50%. I put a PAF Pro and a Custom Custom into an RG-570. *The PAF Pro sounds good. I hope I can score 100% this time.
