SG Standard

[jk001]

been thinking of upgrading the bridge pickup on my SG standard for a while now and heard some good things re. BKP's warpig. seems to fit what i'm after in terms of sound as i'd be playing in drop C (and a lot of people say its well suited to the SG). My only question is to buy ceramic or not? Heard ceramic can be a little too "hot" (not my words). any help would be great.

[Dave Sloven]

I tend to think that the C-Pig would work pretty well in an SG. It's been done before.  It just depends on whether you want to go that extreme.  What style of music?  Drop C covers a lot of ground. You could easily go down to C standard on this pickup too I would think, as long as you use heavy strings.  I have an A-Pig in an Explorer (tuned as low as C standard, but usually C# standard) and I own SGs but I've never put a Warpig in an SG.

You should also consider a Miracle Man set.

[jk001]

i'd be playing mostly modern metal and prog-style music in C standard (not drop C, my mistake). the ceramic seems to boost the low end, which i imagine is good for rhythm playing, but worried this means the high end would sound 'thin' in comparison. I'll have a look at the miracle-man too.

[Dave Sloven]

i'd be playing mostly modern metal and prog-style music in C standard (not drop C, my mistake). the ceramic seems to boost the low end, which i imagine is good for rhythm playing, but worried this means the high end would sound 'thin' in comparison. I'll have a look at the miracle-man too.

If you play much by way of cleans, I would not recommend going further down the hot road than the Cold Sweat (which has excellent cleans, is ceramic, and the set works very well in SGs); if you don't need a real clean sound (i.e., you are happy with a warmish, slightly overdriven clean sound) then I'd go for the Miracle Man, which is a very highly recommended pickup in SGs, or possible the ceramic version of the Nailbomb.  One good feature of ceramics in SGs is that they tend to have an EQ 'scoop' in the mids that is filled out by the strong acoustic mids of the SG itself.  This means (1) that these pickups sound less scooped when installed in an SG & (2) pickups that lack that scoop tend to be overbearing in the mids.  This is less so with low output pickups or extremely high output pickups like the Warpigs.  In the mid-range pickups you really need the scoop that pickups that the Cold Sweat, C-Bomb, and Miracle Man have, unless you are going for a very aggressive hardcore type sound, where you can use pickups like the A-Bomb or Painkiller for very strong mids (although i many cases you can tone that down by rolling back the volume pot I found this weakened my sound with the A-Bomb and negated the value of a hot pickup).

P.S. I don't really like this video, but it might give you *some* idea of what a C-Pig SG can sound like:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PqHFlHUlkc