I've been thinking of getting various BKPs for longer than I can remember, but I finally got round to ordering a set of 'pigs last week and they arrived this morning. After spending the whole day in school (not at any point going home to open the parcel or wire them up, you understand) they were already in my ravelle for some reason.
First impressions are that they absolutely destroy the JB/Jazz set I used to have. They even somehow managed to make my marshall MG sound half decent - that must be witchcraft. Seriously, it was actually producing metal tones. With the gain set at 2. I was too scared to go any higher. Speaking of high, the output level is insane. Still with the gain set at 2, I had to turn my guitar volume down to less than 1 before it cleaned up. It was nice when it did (almost fruity, in a skull crushingly bass heavy sort of way), the hammerfall line, "thunderous symphony" came to mind. The flexibility is unbelievable aswell. In fact, just with my guitar's controls I could get anything from iced-earth-on-steroids metal to what was basically a blues overdrive. (Interestingly, to my ear the pigs were actually louder and heavier with the coil split engaged that my duncans used to be with both coils working.) Tweaking the amp a bit I could even pull off some aerosmith riffs pretty well, aswell as a warm, almost fuzzy distortion that came close to slash's tone. And all from an MG. My next goal is to persuade one of my friends to let me loose with his DSL half stack, if he does I'll try and record some stuff.
There is only one bad point, as far as I can tell. I can't get anything remotely nwobhmy of power metally out of them. presumably they're just too butch for such a camp genre. Which is fine, because I'm putting a strat together that is definitely going to have a painkiller in the bridge now.
Anyway, I wasn't planning on going through all that because I know you must get it all the time. Got a bit carried away. What I meant to ask was, what does the serial number mean? Mine is WP0106, and common sense would suggest that that means only 106 sets have been sold. But that can't be true, can it? I mean, BKPs are probably the most talked about pickups around (almost every player I know knew exactly what they were just from the box), and the warpigs sound absolutely incredible. Surely people must have bought thousands? It doesn't make sense. Does it also mean that if I'd ordered a few weeks earlier I could have got the 100th set? Because that would have been cool.
