When I first looked into pickups for the SG I saw a post on here - which I saw again recently when I was looking over discussions before getting this new one - saying that the Holy Diver was a disaster in the SG, that the mids in the guitar just made it very mushy or something. It wasn't a case of overbearing but clear mids, which is what I have at present, which works for most hardcore styles, but rather just mush. I read something bad about the Crawlers as well. The Painkiller was also excluded because the mids were simply too harsh apparently. The A-Bomb was one of those 'works in some, not in others' pickups. On the whole I'd say it works in mine, but perhaps the combination of the characteristics of the guitar, pickup, and AMP (remembering that I have a 6534+, the most middy of the Peavey 6505 family of amps and also a high-gain beast quickly sent into overdrive by a hot pickup) gave me that result.
When I first bought the SG there were plans to sell the Explorer but then reading posts here I started getting GAS for a Warpig or Miracle Man! I was also discovering that one guitar couldn't cover all of the stuff I like to play, especially given that much of it is in C#/C standard tuning. So I needed a guitar that could cover all of that brutal stuff like Autopsy, Bolt Thrower, Napalm Death, or Ahab, as well as Venom, Black Sabbath, and Electric Wizard. I stopped trying to cover that ground with the SG. The basic problem in the set-up of my SG was that I was trying to cover too much ground, and so I went with what I thought would be most versatile (turns out it wasn't so versatile, at least with my guitar and amp) and combined it with what I thought would be the neck pickup that would be my favourite, the Cold Sweat (being a lover of the work of John Sykes and seeing people using it here for all kinds of applications). The problem is that the Cold Sweat is not a great match for the Nailbomb, at least for the way the Nailbomb sounds in my setup. The Cold Sweat bridge will of course work with the Cold Sweat neck and together in this guitar they should cover the rock area that the Nailbomb is just too brash for and that metal territory not currently covered by the down-tuned Warpig-equipped Explorer.
What pushed me against the Miracle Man for the SG was that I already had Warpigs in my other guitar, and then it would be covering a lot of the territory that I'm already covering. There's also the whole thing of it covering the ground of an EMG, and I can pick up an LTD Viper 400 here for $700 (half price) with an 81/85 set if I really want it, but with what I've done to the Explorer it seems a bit redundant.
When I asked about Miracle Man for the Explorer a few people said that the Warpig would be a better option - including Ben @ BKP - so I went with that. If I had an SG as the second guitar though it might have been a more difficult choice, as both pickups have an excellent reputation in SGs. I might have gone with the MM set then as they are cheaper and look more 'stock' (which I like in SGs, not so worried about in the Explorer) without the double set of screws/bolts. Listening to that guitar now I think the A-Pig was an excellent choice.
Actually Guitar IV my ideas on the Miracle Man would be to get one for a superstrat of some kind later, as that is the one thing I am missing, a guitar with a 'whammy' such as the Floyd Rose. For that I would need a F-spaced pickup and I might even go for the HSS set-up with Sinners like you have. To me that's more appealing than getting another SG or a Les Paul. I'm thinking I may put the A-Bomb into one of those cheapy Epiphone Les Paul Juniors (I'm not worried about the flat top) if the wood resonates right, otherwise into some kind of SG, maybe an Epiphone or Tokai. BTW, have you tried an A-Pig? That might be your next favourite BKP!
