Favorite dimarzio humbucker?

Bob Hoover Ross said:
In the intervening years I gravitated towards Bill Lawrence (when it was Bill's company)....
Becky Lawrence still runs a company making Bill's pups:
http://wildepickups.com/Home_Page.html
There's also "Bill Lawrence USA", run by Jzchak Wajcman, who, as his web site points out: "is not associated with the designer *Bill Lawrence since 1984."
 
Got to give a shoutout to the H4 and S1. They're OEM pickups which are no longer made and were only available as the stock pickups in a couple of Fender guitars.
The H4 is similar to a Breed, but a fraction hotter and with a hair less treble; it splits well without getting shrill, and was first designed for some Fender HH carved top Telecasters which had coil splitting as standard.
The S1 was in the Richie Sambora signature Strats and is essentially a PAF Pro but with screw & slug coils instead of hex pole pieces. It smooths out the tone just every-so-slightly and gives you a little more bass.

When Fender stopped making Sambora strats and also signed a new deal with Seymour Duncan, SD made a replacement for both of these DiMarzios by making the Pearly Gates Plus. This was a PG with an A5 magnet and a fraction hotter wind and went into the Lone Star Strat and relaunched HH carved top Telecaster. That, too, is a great pickup and another one which can't be bought outside of the Fender guitars it comes stock in. (Unless of course someone rips one out of those guitars and resells it.) It's got a little less bass and overall output than the H4 but a little more punch than the S1.


For regular production pickups, I'll go with the Evo 2. It's got pretty much all of DiMarzio's patents thrown at it and it shows; it's one of those rare pickups which is totally unique to one company and nobody else makes anything like it. (Unlike a Super Distortion or JB, which everybody copies.) It's got the EQ balance of a P-90 but hum-cancelling and with all the output of a typical metal/shred humbucker. A very, very even and flexible sound; not unlike an SD Alnico II Pro, but twice as loud.
 
I have a tone zone at the bridge and an air norton at the neck in my VIP and find them well balanced, if a little low in output.
 
This is not to pump my music, but it's a showcase of what the Gravity Storm set can do if you need a sample covering blues to high gain tones.

https://soundcloud.com/frankdesalvo/history
 
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