pickup advice

[mhanbury]

I'm looking for pickups for a guitar with a phase switch coil splitting and active/passive push pull.  Its also a walnut guitar witch I have heard doesn't take all pickups well.

I'm leaning towards getting a black dog in the bridge VH II in the neck but wondering how it will go with all the features listed above.

[darrenw5094]

Depends on the natural tone of the guitar. Is it heavy sounding like a Les Paul?

[mhanbury]

Yes its heavy sounding a Les Paul with a little less treble would be a good comparison.  Iv actually got the stock 498/490 pickups out of a Les Paul studio in it now.

 I'm more curious about do they coil split well and how the active preamp will effect them.

[darrenw5094]

Black dog is heavy in the low mids and kinda vacant in the high mids. Highs are normal, must be one of BKP least balanced pickups. That is the real EQ of it, you can't see that in the BKP EQ charts because they are only bass, mids and treble frequencies that are shown.

[darkbluemurder]

The VHII neck splits well, so that would be a good choice. I have a Black Dog neck but have not set it up for coil splitting. 

I am not familiar with the 498 but I assume that the Black Dog bridge will be slightly lower in output - it is not as powerful as the 9.4 DC resistance suggests. The VHII bridge is in fact slightly more powerful. Have not heard either of them split, though.

The Crawler, Holydiver and Abraxas all split really well. They should be in a similar power range than the 498.

As regards the active preamp: is it set up to boost the pickup signal or only to buffer it? If it boosts the signal, lower output would be beneficial in order not to overload the amp when you don't want it. The downside would be that the lower output you go with a humbucker the thinner it will sound when split.

Cheers Stephan