JP15 Illuminator Pickups

[Doug Lewis]

I picked up a JP15 this weekend. I love the neck and the piezo, but the magnetic pickups sound (I hate to say it) muddy? My other guitars are PRS Tremontis and an ESP Horizon NT6. I'm a huge Petrucci fan and picked this guitar up to cover a lot more territory. The split coil clean is very nice and usable and mixed with the piezo is awesome. Wanted to love the boost function but again it's just not working for me. Any suggestions on pickup replacements or would it be better to find a P24 with a maple neck? I have a set of PRS 85/15s here I'm tempted to try.

 

[Matt_B_77]

Which FAS product are you running the guitar through?

 

[Doug Lewis]

Which FAS product are you running the guitar through?

Axe FX II and 2 Atomic active Wedges

It looks like the PRS pickups won't fit the slots or height of the Illuminators

 

[Matt_B_77]

Based upon all the pre-distortion EQing you can do with the Axe FX you should be more than able to tweak a preset to work with the existing pickups. What I'm saying is with an Axe FX, to me at least, the pickups make much less of a difference than with a traditional rig because you have hundreds of amps, cabs, EQ and level tools to tweak the tone and the output.

For almost all my humbucker guitar I use Dimarzio PAFs because they are fairly balanced, albeit a little bright (500K pots) but I use a TS808 drive to bump the level and tweak the EQ. For the 2 guitars I have with Tone Zones I tweak the EQ and gain a little differently because they have higher output, more bass and more mids than my PAF guitars.