Hey all. I'm thinking about buying a PRS Custom 24 (mahogany body/neck, maple cap, rosewood board) and if so would like to consider a set of BKP to try out in it. I figure this is probably the best made guitar I've bought so far so I might as well go the extra effort with the magnets too!
Anyway, to follow is a bunch of words and phrases used to describe sound that will demonstrate the difficulty in doing so...
I will be using an Axe Fx preamp so versatility is a MUST. My music is comprised of heavy charging melodic turbopick annoying to play riffs to more technical interwoven guitar parts to attempts at sweeping to acoustic rhythm breaks with ebow leads to clean delayed ambient parts to synth textures and over and over the place but the backbone is definitely the metal aspect. A sort of progressive/folk inspired metal project. (I love metal but hate what metal guitar has become... but for reference, some of my favorite tones are Ensiferum/Wintersun, Opeth, some strapping young lad, mastodon. I like 5150s, splawn, boosted jcm800, engl SEs, dual chan recto, mesa mark, and I play around with those sort of amps in stereo with the axe fx. jc-120 and ac30 for the clean tones)
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Tonal qualities I'm looking for:
Bridge Dirty:
Tight punchy high-lows and low-mids, aggressive upper-mids and lower-highs, smooth top highs. Must be clear and defined. I use medium-high gain amps but don't like tons of gain for rhythm. I prefer the sound to be a bit more dry, natural, woody, and aggressively voiced. A very slight southern sound and a ver. slight. djent sound. I sort of imagine an evil telecaster playing through an engl and framus in stereo.
Neck Dirty:
My favorite lead tones I have heard and played come from guitars with alder/mahogany/maple construction and PAF Pros. I love the smooth soft leads on the higher strings/frets and that distinct paf pro "Aoooo" synthy/choir effect I could hear! But I need something that remains a bit more clear when you bring it down to the lower strings/frets and can get a bit more of a grind to the sound in the wound strings or with the right technique. I like to use subtle delay and reverb to help the lead tone.
Bridge clean:
A colder spacy glassy clean from the bridge position. Would be played slowly picked arpeggios/chords for example (Tiamat's a deeper kind of slumber). Something a bit more compressed and sharper.
Neck clean:
The neck clean I want to be something warmer than can venture into a light breakup to get to a blues/jazz feel or a softer solo.
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The PRS has the 5 way rotary, so it would involve various splitting that I am a large fan of. I like playing around with volume and tone controls so something that responds well to that, as well as amp settings, is desirable.
I tend to talk more than warranted so I'll leave it at an already large post.
Thanks.
Edit: Maybe I should mention that some of the pickups that I have considered are Emeralds, VHIIs, Mules, Cold Sweat, Painkiller, and Nailbombs... but that's just from the youtube clips/posts around here so it's not very solid and I can't make specific inferences off them. Also my experience with high output pickups is that I'm sick of them because I keep sacrificing versatility. So I do consider some of the higher output options still with BKP provided there isn't such a compromise.
