Back again for my roughly twice a year BKP buying question session!
So I have a nice Tele, well, it's Parker's "Southern Nitefly" take on it, so Swamp Ash with a Maple neck, but the neck has a thin carbon fibre exoskeleton to it with hardened stainless frets, and it's a double cut rather than a tele's single cut, but it's otherwise a tele in hardware and woods and the tone is definitely tele reminiscent... anyway...
Background guff... I've already got BKPs in a few of my other guitars, a mixture of (Bridge->Neck):
Mahogany Fly Mojo - Holy Diver / Mule in one (both uncovered) - rocks and love the bluesier neck
Mahogany Nitefly - Nailbomb (uncovered) / IT / IT - general varied heavy use with mahogany strat flavours
Swamp Ash Nitefly - Crawler (uncovered)/MoMilk/MoMilk (not RWRP) - more funkier strat than the general use one and the does the strat-blues SRV-ish better
Mahogany Nitefly - Nailbomb (covered with split) / Supermassive (neck as middle) / MoMilk - current most used one
My music tends to have a lot of heavy fat (alt/stoner/grunge more so than heavy metal speed hardcore stuff think Tool), with loads of varied breaks and sections that are bluesy, funky or atmospheric. Hence those guitars mentioned above will rock on the bridge, then do all manner of funk or blues with the neck pickups etc. I also quite like the sound of a weaker pickup with lots of gain for that grunge/post rock kinda sound. Currently this tele doesn't get played that much, but it does that nice high gain on a bright twangy pickup thing that has quite a nice bit of clarity and less compression than a humbucker. I've used it more recording than gigs from that point of view - kinda makes me see how Jimmy Page swore by his Les Pauls live, but actually did a good few things in the studio on a tele. It's currently got a Seymour STL-1b ('50s broadcaster-ish bridge) and STR-1 ('54-ish neck) currently. But I feel it's missing a little of some of the magic of my other BKP-equipped guitars, so I figured new pickups may be the way to go, but what? The 'same' or similar thing but 'better'? Or is increasing the output what I'm after?
Is going hotter going to make it lose some of the differentiation to my other guitars and water down the bright twangier tone I get from it? Supposedly I should kinda go hotter if I'm playing heavier stuff, but equally is that a nonsense for what I'm doing, and the Blackguard Flat '50 or Yardbird will still do heavy fine with my Diezel but give me more scope for vintage flavours? Or am I genuinely better off getting a Piledriver say (although the idea of purposefully buying a more "hardcore" pickup for a guitar I specifically want more of that true lower-output tele vibe from scares me)? Or should I be expecting somewhere in the middle to play out best, and if so Brown Sugar or Boss? I like a good fuzz pedal quite often too (although that's not my regular sound), but always find the single coils or the P90 seem to work better with fuzzes too.
So I have some pretty good flexible pickup combos in my current other ones for what I'm doing, but would like to make this a far more used alternative to the others. However, there's no point owning many guitars and homogenising them into very much a similar thing though, so I think I kinda want the lowest output that gives me what I need, and gives me that tele thing best, as long as I don't gain a load of issues with the low output. Dan Steinhardt form That Pedal Show seems to always have great tone at everything and his bridge pickup seems to have a similar impedance to the Yardbird. Obviously the bulk of my playing is biased heavier, but again I'm not scared of some post-rock twang, grunge, punk and love those Radiohead kinda sounds (from across the whole of their catalogue). If I'm playing Tool and AiC I'll probably grab a different guitar anyway, but it'd still need to do a lot of grinding heavy rock...
So, thoughts? High gain amps + low output tele pickups = win? Or not...
</waffle>
