The Final Chapter:
Because I couldn't fit a covered Suhr SSV into my Regius, I went ahead and ordered a VHII in raw nickel a month ago. I had no complaints with the Suhr SSV at all, in fact I really love that pickup and thought that it paired very well with the Holydiver. Still, I somehow wanted to give another neck pickup a try here, even though I've dropped a lot of money into this guitar already! I mostly wanted the aesthetics of a raw nickel cover. I also had the extremely strange experience of my high e-string getting stuck on the lip of the bobbin of my uncovered SSV in rehearsal last week when I was really spanking the strings hard. I thought that I'd broken a string at first...anyway I've never had that happen before, and generally prefer covered pickups.
I've only had it installed for a few days, and in the past I've had some definite honeymoon periods with Bare Knuckle pickups, so I don't want to jump to conclusions too quickly. However my initial impression is that this is one of the most impressive neck pickups I've ever played! It's just fantastic for what it does. It splits very well, too.
The VHII sounds more different from the Holydiver bridge than the Suhr SSV did. I'm not sure yet whether that means it's a better or worse match; for instance, both the SSV and VHII sound closer to the Holydiver bridge than the Holydiver neck does. Sometimes you want your bridge and neck pickups to be similarly matched, and sometimes you want them to be able to provide more contrasting sounds. The VHII and Holydiver combinations is somewhere in between those two extremes.
Comparing the VHII to the SSV: the VHII definitely has more output, but still has excellent clarity. Despite being higher output, it's a bit more polite than the SSV in some sense; the SSV has more sizzle/sting on top than the VHII, for sure. The SSV sounds more raw. The VHII is a bit smoother and warmer, though it's not nearly as warm or smoothed out as an Emerald, for instance. The VHII has a great EQ for a neck pickup to my ears, despite being more polite than I was expecting. However with gain, that same quality that sounds polite at first turns into fluidity. It's got a lot of "juice" and is very fluid and weighty, similar to the Holydiver bridge in that sense. This is where it really shines to me, though the cleans are excellent as well. I can definitely see why so many shredders love this pickup (I'm not much of a shredder myself).
The real test is with the band of course, but I'm about 99.99% sure that THIS is my final pickup combination! I'm loving the Holydiver bridge more and more as time goes by; it's got an excellent weight behind single notes and a great fullness to chords, is tight enough for me, and to my ears is incredibly versatile. It's almost more of a medium output pickup than high output, definitely lower output than my Suhr SSH+ and the Alnico Nailbomb. The Alnico Nailbomb is sometimes described as a do-it-all pickup than can handle hot blues, classic rock, and modern metal equally well, but that really wasn't my impression of it in this guitar at all. It seemed to always want to explode into 90's and beyond hard rock and metal, and I didn't think that it had very good cleans. The Holydiver is more versatile to me, and actually doesn't sound stuck in the 80s to me at all. I actually don't like much 80s music of any type...
So my original intention was to have the Mayones Regius be kind of a "Les Paul on steroids," and in some sense that's what I've got. Now that I've had it for a while and tried various pickups in it, it's become a little more modern than I had originally envisioned. It still does the older stuff pretty well, but I've definitely got a great guitar for Alice in Chains, Katatonia, Tool, Opeth type of stuff, all the way up to, say Plini and all but the most extreme modern sounds. I'm really happy and it's become an excellent tool for my sonic arsenal, it has a different place than my R9 or Suhr Modern HSH (the other humbucker guitars that I have).
Just one last thing for anyone struggling with a Mayones Regius: after a lot of pickup changes I think that the guitar itself, with that 11-ply neck-thru design, has a quite fundamentally bright, tight, and somewhat clinical/sterile sound. I can see why a lot of modern metal and prog guys favor them, just keep that in mind when looking for pickups. I'd suggest warmer pickups than you might initially think of (that's what seems to be working for me, anyway).
