EMG SL20 Steve Lukather

Bought this Pickup Set around 5 years ago for my Bullet strat (cheapest squier there is) and it transformed a nice playable guitar with mediocre pickups at best into a great guitar with awesome sound.

Versatility showed when i switched bands from a Rock band to Black metal and then even to an old school Death metal band. The only thing that changed was the tunning and the string thickness. On the E standard an D tunning humbucker gives a clear rich sound, and when you drop the tunning to B its just a insane greasy sound, which is probably not for everyone but it was music to ears for me. The only thing I did on the B tunning was to shut the Tone Knob completely and it gave just enough treble to make things work.

The humbucker has a rich gainy sound with much to play with, but i didn't like it too much on clean. On the contrary the single coils don't like distortion much but they begin to shine once you witch to a clean or crunch channel.

The assembly is extremely easy, all the cables have connectors so no soldering is required.
Modifications on the guitar (Bullet strat) I needed to do:
- Hole for the Battery
- Wider hole for the cables that lead to the input
- Deeper hole for the Switch which is bigger by a margin compared to the stock one

Other big plus with this pickup set its very easy to switch guitars. It took me less than 30min to move it from bullet to my affinity squier (only body modification is wider hole for the cable of the input and fore the battery, hole under the switch is just enough deep). Didn't even need to remove the strings. Again the improvement was insane

I ordered those pickups to give life to my old, cheap strat, which I love. Having everything pre-soldered and easy to install was the real value, that pursuaded me to buy this piece(s) of gear.

The pickguard didn't fit - and the old one had different holes for pots, which i had to re-drill, because pots in this set are connected together and demand fixed size between them. I cannot imagine installing them to guitar with solid body, with no pickguard!

The sound is good, as expected. EMG 85 in bridge position sounds very rich, however very bass-heavy. In basswood guitar its a little bit too much. Single coils have half output of the humbucker, but they sound very nice. If i had to use them in the same song with the humbucker, i would use a pedal to compensate.