Comparing Pickups
There are many different manufacturers of pickups, Seymour Duncan, Fender and DiMarzio to name just a few.
Let’s talk about their sound.
A pickup sound is very subjective and varies on the wiring, pots, etc. But the fact is, all that equal, if you wire them with the same gauge, same number of winds, same winding pattern, same magnets and same magnet strength, they are equal. In theory they will sound virtually identical.
Vintage Pickups are Better?
But what about those “vintage” pickups? Older pickups often sound smoother and less shrill to some people only because the magnets tend to slowly lose the magnetization over time. You can achieve affect by mucking around with the magnetism but that’s definitely more of an art form.
Ear Curve and Fatique
Our human ear is not perfect. People ears have different response curves and they get fatigued over time in a listening session. Play 5 guitars and now compare the first one to the that second one AGAIN. Do you subjective hear the same difference? Add into that, as we age our hearing curve changes, we do not normally lose hearing in a linear fashion, a dip here, a dip there, but also high frequency loss is common.
The best method
To find the pickups you really like, you may have to try many of them and find the one(s) that you gravitate to. Also, the position will make a difference in which pickup you might prefer. Hot Rod wiring alters the output and frequency response of pickups so it offers some nice “alternatives’ to the stock sound,
Heavy use of pedals and amp distortion
If you use a lot of distortion, boost and amp modeling you can potentially lose some or all of the frequency response of your pickup due to heavy sonic processing. Two differently wound humbuckers that are close in spec will scream through a marshal amp and sound fantastic.
Heavy Distortion, Boost and the type of pickup wiring
Note that single coils are MUCH different than humbuckers so that extreme variation will affect your destination sound and distortion. A wonderful example of that is Brian Mays use of treble boost on otherwise anemic sounding out of phase pickups. Who would have guessed?