Pickups?

Ive been looking into kinda building my own guitar (buying the raw wood body and all that stuff) over the summer and I was wondering what kind of pickups I should use. I play alot of metal and rock but I dont want too much of this so called "fat tone" from the humbuckers. Id still like to have a guitar with a bright tone to it. Ive been leaning towards using alder on the body since supposedly that can be used for any style but I have no clue what im doing when it comes to pickups.
If anyone could help me out of this dark haze of confusion im in that would be great.


Jimmy

A lot of people swear by Dimarzio pickups. I replaced my active EMGs with some and couldn't be happier. They have a ton of different models with lots of options.

You could go with a H-S-H setup and get a switch with lots of stops, and wire it to split your Humbuckers, so you get the "best" of both worlds, ie. S-S-S, and H-H standard setups.

I just have two humbuckers but I wired them with a 5 way switch and split the coils so postion 1 is my bridge Humbuckers, 2 = outside coil of bridge, 3 = inside coil on both bridge and neck, 4= outside coil on my neck and 5 = my neck humbucker. It really does give me lots of options with the tone, and being able to switch to single coils helps **** loads when playing clean. I have pretty high output pickups so being able to tone it down so to speak helps when playing different styles of music sicne I like to play anything from death metal to jazz to indie rock.

Pretty much all my guitars have DiMarzio pickups - mostly the PAF Pro and Evolutions. My best suggestion is you go to guitar stores and play a load of different guitars through the same amp... then find out what pickups the guitar you like best has.

The soundclips on pickup manufacturer's websites give an indication, but that's all. If you want a strat sound with more bite, the Lindy Fralin pickups in my Strat sound great...

Great, that helps. Thanks for the info

I have a couple more questions about guitar bodies. One is what advantage is there to a one piece solid body electric guitar? Is there any tone difference? Also since the company I am ordering from (warmoth) does not have H-S-H setup in stock like I want I have to rear route (or so they tell me). I dont mind the slight difference in price (though can someone explain rear routing to me as well?) but I would like to have a tremolo bar for my guitar but I cannot find this option for rear routing. Is a tremolo bar with rear routing impossible or am I jut blind?

Thanks,
Jimmy

rear routing means the there is no need for a pick guard. les pauls prs styles most jackson charvel and ibanez style super strats are back routed. the pick ups cavity are step up so you can 'mount' the pick ups directly to the body or use pick up rings that look like square O rings almost (think les paul here) to mount the pickups. also the control cavity has a plate mounted over it on the back of the guitar so only the shafts of the pots/ switches show.

you should beable to get the termolo with a rear routed body. but you might want to also look into other desgins too like kahler bigsby and every other one out there.

a one peice body depends on how is was cut. verse three peisce bodies or two peice. if you put the body together wrong you can dis rupt how the sound travels through the body, but a once peice thats cut wrong can do that too.

have you found the exact pickup set/ indivudal picks you want yet? have you looked into gibson ducan dimarzio emg fralin carvin and every other type on the market?

No need for a pickguard? What if I want one? Can I still put one on just for looks?

if thats what you want. but its a little more frustrating to wire a back route that a front if your going to use a pick guard anyway you might consider that, but its your axe so get what you can be happy with and to hell with everyone else.