I play death/thrash/melodeath/neoclassical/prog/folk and want to have pickups that can be used fairly well for most purposes. I mostly play death/thrash/neoclassical shred (well, neoclassical wank in my case) so I would prefer something that will handle this stuff better than the other styles. My issue is I've been looking at some dimarzio's and others and they look pretty good for getting that smooth, liquid lead sound for shred, but maybe its just the guys who use them but I need to get a really agressive sound from the bridge pickup to get that huge distorted chunk, and I can't tell from what I'm reading and the demos and samples I've heard which ones would be good for these applications. Someone at Ultimate Guitar reccomended I check out Bare Knuckles, so here I am.
I play a Dual Rec right now but I'm picking up and Engl in the near future (either a powerball or a savage so thats changing), and am looking to put these in my PRS standard 24 to see how it goes because I've never swapped the pickups out of one of my guitars before.
What pickup combination would you reccomend so that they were agressive enough for that heavy, high gain, aggressive riffing in the bridge position but can also give you that smooth liquid lead on the neck? I think the guy (sorry I can't remember what your username was if you end up reading this) reccomended a Miracle Man/Cold Sweat set, and someone else reccommended War Pigs and someone reccomended the Holy Diver. What are the advantages and disadvantages of these various pickups for the aforementioned application?
Thanks in advance to anyone that helps up.