If you want to play a majority of music made nowadays in a cover band and get the tones close - using only ONE guitar - it's important to have the humbucker at the bridge. You can fake it with Fender's Eric Clapton active mid-boost circuit, but it's still not a humbucker... If you use a relatively high-powered humbucker (HB) and split the coils, you have a single-coil (SC) bridge pickup, for "Tele" twang and Strat bite. If you want to get the
right SRV/Hendrix/Eric Johnson tone, you need a single coil at the neck - or a split HB. The problem there is magnetic pull - if you put a HB pickup in the neck position that's powerful enough to work effectively when split, the magnets may pull on your strings killing some sustain and tone. There are a lot of noiseless, neck SC options that'll at least get close to a great SC sound. Here's what I did for an all-in-one bar band guitar:
The Bill Lawrence L500XL bridge pickup is plenty powerful enough that the split-coil sounds are authentic, and the neck L280 pickup is a stacked noiseless design that still nails the "Little Wing" tone. The five-way Superswitch lets me choose either of the HB coils, or both coils in parallel, series or out-of-phase. Each pickup has a concentric tone/volume control, so I can balance in varying amounts of either pickup to the other by leaving the three-way in the middle - the normal Gibson four-knob arrangement. It took me a few rewires to get the capacitors right but there's
nothing about it I'd change now.
What it
won't do is a really mushy neck HB sound - I guess I could put a towel over the speaker - or the sometimes-useful Strat quacky stuff made by two single coils (one
middle) wired together. My SC - split HB combinations are too far apart to quack. :-\ It's not a sound that appeal to me enough to sweat over, even thought Mark Knopfler (and many others) has made great use of them. If I ever have to play "Lay Down Sally" or similar quacky stuff, I just use the single coil from the L500 furthest from the bridge and mute... if I had to play in a funk band I'd need quack, but I'd get out of that gig, I suspect. :icon_biggrin:
There are lots of options, and only other guitarists even care what you do - ask any groupie, "All electric guitars sound alike...." My only rule is that you can always cut clarity, sustain and volume coming out of a guitar, but if you try to add sustain or treble to a fundamentally mushy sound using electronics you're going to be adding a high percentage of noise-to-tone.
