After years of playing and experimentation, I still don't understand how people get neck humbuckers to even remotely cut through in a live situation. Moore managed it, and also Bonamassa, Schenker etc, so evidently it is possible. But for me, I always just switched to the neck humbucker and immediately lost my sound. The only neck HB which sort of worked for me was the Duncan Jazz, but I still wasn't happy.
I do like neck pickup tones though, due to Uli Jon Roth really. To get a workable tone, I've been using strat coils, mini humbuckers, and full sized humbuckers wired in parallel. All the solutions have worked really well, and I've been happy with the results.
However, I still had a bunch of Flying Vs with PAF style pickups where it wasn't appropriate to use any of those techniques. I've been searching for a solution to this and found a post somewhere online where Seymour Duncan (no less) recommended soldering in a 47nF capacitor in series with the neck humbucker. I decided to try this, and it did indeed remove a bit of low end. I experimented with values and eventually settled on 3.3nF, which I tested in rehearsal and works well. Usable neck HB tone finally.
The disadvantage of this has been that the extra capacitor doesn't work well with my favourite treble boosters, or also fuzz faces. I don't use the fuzz face very often frankly, but I am disappointed about the treble boosters now not being possible with that setup.
So I have switched to FET boosters like the SHO and something called a Big Omar, from Juan Solo.
