Recommend neck & bridge for Tele?

[Aether]

Hi I'm new to this forum but have been reading the posts on various occasions. Very good forum!

Am just wondering, I fancy a new neck & bridge pickups for my Standard Telecaster. BKP of course as I've had experience with a BKP Mississippi Queen P90 in the neck of an older guitar and it was fantastic.

What I'm thinking is I want a warm, P-90-esque tone in the neck pickup - not too phat but not wire-y thin. Just something that will sound great clean and ever-so-slightly distorted/overdriven.

And for the bridge, well, something that can handle nice big heavy riffs. Not classic rock style ones, but not metal type ones. If you can imagine a picture, something like Matt Bellamy's riffs (I know he uses Nailbombs, but I only need to get close not exact :)). Nice, organic sounds that doesn't sound too cliche-metal. Nicely distorts in other words. Hot too :) Also a clean tone with it would be nice, but am not tooooo fussed about that.

I was thinking of a Yardbird in the neck & either a Piledriver or Brown Sugar in the bridge?

Any suggestions would be great. Thank you!

[PhilKing]

Short of putting a P-90 in the neck position (which has been done before!), I would go with the Piledriver calibrated set.  The Blackguard neck will also give you a fatter neck tone than the regular tele.  The piledriver is the hotest output tele bridge, but it is not a drive monster.

[riverbluff]

I have the Piledriver set in my Warmoth tele and they sound great.  The bridge pickup has a nice heavy sound at full volume, but cleans up super nice when you roll off a little.  The neck pickup has a nice warm sound.

Bill

[TheDev01dOne]

I have the Yardbird set in my Tele and I don't think it's what you're looking for in the neck position. It drives pretty well but it has quite a dark 60s Tele neck tone almost, not as open and airy as a P-90 sound.

Maybe you could get like a Piledriver set with no cover on the neck pickup, that should open up the sound a bit more and be close to what you want. Possibly even the Yardbird set without the cover on the neck should do what you want.

The Yardbird bridge is good for mildly distorted metal tones IMO, just pick a bit closer to the neck than normal and it takes some of the edge off. I find them a good middle ground between vintage Tele sounds and more modern sounds.

Then again I've not tried any other BKP Tele pickups so don't take that all as definite fact.

[AndyG]

If there's a BK close to a Seymour Duncan Alnico Pro 2, that might well suit you; I had a set in a Lite Ash Tele which did the sprangy, wiry, clean thing and also really responded well to being overdriven.