first, the back story:

years ago in a galaxy far, far away...i was in need of some pickups and didn't have much money. so i searched the internet for any and every cheap pickup i could find. sure, i found plenty of cheap pickups, but for some reason (that i can't remember now), i bought the guitarheads humbuckers. i actually have a pair from the days before they put the 80's looking logo on them. i put those humbuckers on my trusty purple super strat (replacing duncan jb and 59) and forgot all about them.

years later, i needed some more cheap pickups for another guitar i was building, and i came across Dragonfire pickups. i spoke with the owner (Ken) who assured me that all of those cheap pickup guys buy their pickups from the same place (China) and they all sound the same. so i bought a couple sets from them (www.guitarpartsonline.com) and tried them out. i even bought a strat kit and put it together myself. the frets were truly terrible and required much work to be playable....but that's another story. let's just say "don't go there". the reason i went away from the guitarheads pickups was because i was entertaining building guitars with my own company, and i just couldn't see selling anything American made with cheap priced pickups with that logo on them. people are gonna change out your factory pickups anyway, so i thought i should not bother spending much on them (as long as the import pickups sounded good).

a couple years later, i'm playing with various modelers and tweaking around the Dragonfire pickups. and for some reason i started thinking that my purple strat had the same pickups installed in them, and i wondered why it sounded so brighter by comparison. it was a major challenge to make presets that translated well on other people's gear for sure.

then i bought a Carvin head; when i started trying out all of my guitars, it became apparent that some of the pickups were terrible! the purple strat just had that EVH thing working no matter what i did, and i liked it. the other guitars equipped with Dragonfire pickups just sounded really bassy and dull. at first i thought it had to be the wood type making it sound so dark, but i later figured out that wasn't the case.

using my purple guitar, i started making eleven rack presets and the new presets were so drastically different (and translated better) that i had to rethink if a cared for that 80's logo on the new guitarheads pickups.

so last week i ordered another set of guitarheads pickups. this model in particular: http://guitarheads.net/products/pickups/hexbucker.html

i decided that my Ibanez rgt42 (Mahogany neck-through) would be a good test guitar, because it does sound really dark with the dragonfire pickups. so i gutted the guitar and started from scratch with the new pickups. after hooking them up, i set the pickup height. the way i do that is to lay the guitar down and put a 1mm pick on the pickup's small string side and adjust the pickup height (while holding the string down at the highest fret) until the string just touches the pick. then i go to the low string side and use two 1mm picks and adjust the height the same way.

the tone test: OH MY GOSH! these pickups are the bomb! huge and fat, with high end clarity. if you like EVH tone, these are the pickups to buy. i even tried tuning down to the key of death and these pickups never failed to cut through perfectly. more surprises are found; normally when i select both pickups (using your average humbucker) the tone is just blah, but not so with these. it almost has a P90 tone, but without the noise. in a 24 fret guitar, the neck pickup can be used for high gain crunch without sounding muddy. overall, very versatile pickups.

here is an EVH type of example: https://soundcloud.com/singtall/humans-being
for the intro, i'm using the middle toggle position (both pickups) with my guitar volume rolled back, then i go to the bridge pickup with the guitar volume up full. please excuse the E standard tuning, i didn't feel like setting up my floyd rose tailpiece again for E flat (which is what this song calls for).

i bought these pickups on ebay for $39.99 a pair plus $6 shipping, which is $10 cheaper than buying them from the guitarheads website. overall, i can't complain about these pickups...even the logo isn't that bad once the pickups are mounted on the guitar. so if you are in the market for some pickups, i HIGHLY recommend these guitarheads pickups.