Hello all,
I was hoping you could please give me your advice on the following.
TL;DR: I have a Carvin HH2 Holdworth (headless and chambered) guitar coming in. I want a versatile pickup that can do metal very well but is not going to be too undefined and flubby coupled with the chambered body.
It comes stock with the Carvin HH pickups which I am sure are amazing. He gets some killer lead tones. I'm not knocking those pickups and I will certainly play them a lot before I yank them out. But I'm pretty sure they will not suit my style. Thing is, I recently acquired a guitar with an Aftermath in the bridge and was able to confirm first hand that BKPs are indeed worth the price and effort. So now I'm planning a pickup swap (for a guitar I haven't played yet :D) and I would like your help.
I enjoy playing blues, fusion, clean jazz, backing tracks, all sorts of stuff, but my main thing is METAL! This will be my main go-to guitar and I will be working with it to practice my chops and to write my metal oriented tracks. I value versatility a lot, but it has to do metal well. I will have the coil-split option but I'm not gunning for a single coil sound. I have a Fender YJM and [flame suit on] in my personal opinion nothing touches the tone or feel of that guitar. Not looking to replace, rather looking to complement.
I loved the Aftermath to play Children of Bodom, Necrophagist, Symphony X, etc. For the latter it achieved this really nasally saggy tone that was clear and thick and it was great. I could nail Michael Romeo's single string thick riffage exactly, sans the killer chops. However, I am a believer that you can get killer metal tones with lower output pickups, and that the key is clarity and the right EQ fit with your woods/guitar (duh!).
As I (slowly) improve as a player no matter how heavy the song I find myself dialing back the gain and getting more of the aggression from my right hand. Plus, BKP pickups to me seem actually lower output than other manufacturers. For the bridge I want something that palm mutes well and for my own songs that I am writing I want something with a wide and darker sound. Definitely not ice picky or too dry. For the neck I love being able to roll back the volume and get a semi-breakup sound and I absolutely love darker, smokey jazz clean tones for plucking chords and simple leads.
Don't ask me why but I've really been leaning towards getting an Abraxas covered calibrated set. I haven't heard much about these pickups but I just get the impression that they are a good fit for me. I read one guy who said that it crushes for down tuned metal (nice!) and I also saw a youtube video of an absolutely killer player coaxing some super sweet vintagey but throaty blues/country tones from an LP through a Dumble (but honestly that guy would sound amazing with a couple of rubber bands stretched across a cereal box with an acoustic hole).
FYI, I will mostly tune to E, *maybe* the occasional drop-D.
My only concern is that the HH2 is a chambered guitar and that is where I really need your help. Maybe this guitar needs a trebly pickup? I just really don't know.
Just FYI, I used to own a EBMM JPX7 that played amazing and is also chambered. Ultimately I felt that I was always dialing back the bass all the time no matter what amp model I was using on my Axe Fx II and that the low B was way too flubbey and undefined. Overall it turned me off from chambered bodies until like an idiot I fell for another chambered guitar (the Carvin HH2).
So, anyways, if I wanna write metal songs but enjoy vintage-y throaty gutsy tones as well for fun, should I go Abraxas?
Will the chambered body work against me and make the sound too bass-y and undefined?
Misha posted a killer metal tone sample with his Carvin HH2 with the stock pickups, but thats not really the tone I'm going for, I'm a bit more old school about my metal tones. Love djent, just don't wanna play it.
I haven't read anything about how the Abraxas sound when the single coil option is engaged!! What do they sound like? This is really important for me. For example, my Dimarzio Dactivator 7 was a really nice more trebly high output bridge pickup but the single coil sound kind of sucked in my opinion.
Santana has a nice tone but it is definitely not what I am after.
What do you guys think I should get? Am I overlooking another pickup from BKP or another manufacturer altogether? Would love to hear your input.
Lastly, sorry for the verbose post, but these things are inevitably subjective and I see no other way to communicate what I'm after. If I had the ability to summarize it and communicate it with a graph or equation I definitely would.... thanks in advance for your patience and help!
