DIY Fever

Ibanez RG2550 pickup upgrade, part 1

After almost two years of playing with this guitar completely stock I decided to try to swap the pickups. Being a total gear slut I couldn’t resist trying out the new DiMarzio John Petrucci signature pickups. As I’m mostly using the bridge pickup it’s the one to replace first. I bought DiMarzio Crunch Lab to start with and replaced stock DiMarzio-IBZ pickup.

Don’t get me wrong, stock pickups are pretty good. Unlike some “Designed by <put brand name here>” pickups, these are actually built by DiMarzio for Ibanez Prestige models. They are designed to work good for anything between rock and metal and as such cannot be awesome for everything in between. What I wanted to change is to have tighter bass response that would work better for palm muted rhythm sections. Too much bass and it starts to sound a bit flabby. For hard rock, chords and solos stock pickups are just fine.

It turned out to be just what I hoped for. I can’t tell any significant difference in power, but it’s much clearer for rhythm parts which was my goal. Highs are about the same or just a tad hotter than stock pickups. Harmonics pop out easily. Now that the bridge pickup is swapped I will have to do neck as well. Stock neck pickup is very warm and doesn’t go perfectly with the Crunch Lab, so getting Liquifire or Air Norton is probably the next step for me. I’m happy that I swapped the pickup but I’m not sorry for not doing it sooner as it used to be the case for some other guitars. Stock pickups are really nice and they can provide few years of fun.