I would highly recommend against using just one pickup no matter what they are. No tele esquires, no Les Paul juniors, no Van Halen frankensteins, no single active pickup metal monsters. Almost any guitar with two pickups can be versatile ENOUGH, just because you will have natural (not necessarily electronic) phasing sounds when combining two pickups, and the neck pickup will sound warmest alone, and the bridge pickup will sound the brightest alone, no matter what the pickups are. That said, I am a big fan of active pickups to get that wall of sound from your stack when playing metal. It won't have the dynamics and articulation of passive pickups necessarily, but the duncan blackouts and emg x series are finding more of a middle ground here. If I was building an active pickup guitar for myself, it would be the EMG 81X for the bridge and the EMG 85X for the neck. :icon_thumright: