During the past few days I have been pulling guitars apart and rebuilding them, interchanging and trying different pickups along the way. As a result of this I'm finding that there's an awful lot of rubbish talked about which pickups are best, or not.
I have set up a Strat with some expensive 'Sliders' piickups costing in excess of £200 and the guitar sounds amazing and very 'early Hank' sounding, with all the same tonal characteristics that contribute to THAT SOUND - whichever one you choose dependant on how you set up the amplifier.
I then removed the 'Sliders' and fitted some Seymour Duncan Alnico Pro II pickups, carefully setting the pickup height the same as the 'Sliders' only to find them equally good, albeit very slightly different but in a good way.
This prompted further investigation and I did the same with some Ironestone, Toneriders and cheap ones costing £19.99 that came on a pickguard with the knobs and switch from AGC guitars that I bought recently.
I have to say that all of them did the business, it's just a case of careful 'set up', getting the heights to the optimum level, getting the bridge and nut levels correct, even with light gauge strings (9/42) after using 11/52 & my current 10/46, the sound is there in spades.
I have heard some poor pickups, normally glassy, harsh sounds on some cheaper guitars, but these are usually the ones with the bar magnet underneath them, ceramics I believe. The ones I have are all alnico, even the really cheap ones and I'm realising that it's all in the set up, after all how many times have people said that pickups are just wire wrapped around magnets ? A crude assumption I agree, but I don't think that the high prices are warranted given that there is so little difference in the examples that I had at my disposal.
I have some Kinman and Fender Noiseless that I no longer use and fancy giving those a crack, just to see that if with more care in the set up, it may be possible to achieve similar results, sound-wise to the normal pickups.