Anyone know anything about pickups?

I have a badass Flying V, but after playing a friends guitar with much hotter pickups, I have decided I need new ones installed. My stock pups SUCK. Harmonics are non-existant, and I can't squeal for anything.

Has anyone installed new ones before? Is it hard? Dimebuckers any good?

Hmmm... if you want squealies, then I suppose active pups would be the most obvious choice, like EMGs. I've never installed them, but I think that you need to route out a bit more of the body to install the 9V battery that powers them, which is a bit of a pain in the ass. If I'm wrong, please feel free to correct me. I think that EMGs tend to cut out a bit of the low end "oomf" from the natural tone of the guitar though, which isn't necessarily that important. However, I don't know what wood (or indeed, the make) your V is made out of. If it's something dense, like mahogany, then aesthetically you might not want to tamper with cutting out the lows.

If you go for the passive pups, then there are quite a lot of good, high output ones that you can install yourself quite easily, provided that you know how to solder. Check out DiMarzio, with their Breed and Evolution models (Steve Vai's got them installed in his JEMs) and the Super Distortion; or Seymour Duncan (which you obviously have man!), with the Dimebucker (ditto) and the Invader. I've also read a lot of good reviews about Bare Knuckle Pickups (www.bareknucklepickups.co.uk), which are apparently supposed to be really good. They're hand wound, and they are a good price too. I've emailed them a couple of times to ask them questions, and they're really helpful, so maybe you can enquire there.

One thing that I have found out that you might want to mind out for is that the spacing of the poles on the pickups matches the spacing of the strings, because they do vary a bit.

If you can't solder yourself, it is pretty inexpensive to get it done by your local guitar store I think, unless they're absolute pirates.

Dude, I know this is maybe overkill, but pickups are not necessarily where the problem lies if you find you can't get squealies: maybe it has something to do with the setup of the bridge, the height of the strings etc. I'd recommend looking around www.jemsite.com, which is probably one of the biggest collections of guitar geeks on the net, and seeing what they have to say.

Anyway, I bored you enough already. This is just shit that I've picked up by myself, and I am not an authority on pickups and/or guitar setups but I hope it helps you some. Peace out dude!

If you are installing active pickups, you need to take it to a guitar fitter or you will end up electrocuting yourself.

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Why do you say that?

Because people are too retarded to ground things properly.

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ohh man i tried changing ma pickups one time and i fucked it up somehow lol so i took it to someone who knows about shit like that jejejejeje

Well in my opinion, EMG's are good for one thing only, and thats in your face metal tone. Anything else is completely non-existance.

Personally, I would choose some DiMarzios, excellent research goes into their pickups, with excellent results.

For a Mahogany body I would recommend as Super Distortion(Bridge) and a PAF Pro(neck)

For a Basswood body I'd go with an X2N(bridge) and an Air Norton(Neck)

I second that. I play a Fender with a Super Distortion in the bridge, and it's perfect. It will give you enough balls in clean to stand out of the mix, but in distortion it does just what it says, and with the right distortion behind it, it can blow the roof off a house. For things like squealies (i assume you mean false harmonics) alot of things could be the sulprit. First off someone said it might be the bridge, which could very well be the problem. But it might also have to do with your EQ and signal. Sometimes if there's too many pedals clogging up the signal prior to the amp, minute things can get lost. I would recommend something along the lines of a 7-10 band EQ pedal (Danelectro makes one for thirty bucks) and most importantly and Sonic Maximizer for BBE. I bought one being very skeptical, but it's an amazing improvement on my sound. It literally makes everything just sound better. Anyway, hope I helped.

I have that Dano EQ pedal. I should probably use it more. I'm not sure it's a matter of EQing it though. My friend's pickups are quite obviously very "hot" and the ones in my V are somewhat muddy. It's OK for the time being because I play rhythm anyway, but it would be nice to have something that sustains and soars to encourage me to learn leads better, without having to rely too much on my effects, y'know?

So do you think I should go with a Dimebucker or an EMG in BOTH positions, or might I want two different pickups for different sounds? (At least one of them needs that Dime squawk and thump

Man if youre going to go the emg route, run it at 18v instead of 9, and go with an 81/61a combo.