Pick Up Configurations - Clean and Dirty

I'm going to do a Carvin kit, and looking for advice on the pickups.

You can do a dual humbucker with center single coil. Will this get me a sound that will sound good with open chords on hymns (worship band) and also allow me to get a little dirt on the powerchord songs?

I agree with the above, and would just add that if your pickup lacks highs (i.e., is a high-output unit), there's no way you're going to add them later, whereas a low-output pickup can easily be made dirty with the right amp and proper adjustments. My favorite combination (of humbuckers) is a Seymour Duncan Jazz at the neck and a Dimarzio Virtual PAF at the bridge. You'll get wonderful chimey cleans, and nice articulate distortion when overdriven with an amp.

Joe http://www.exotic-scales.com

One fairly hot single coil in the neck position and a 12K ohms resistence humbucker in the bridge position will give you some tone options without costing too much.

I'm going to do a Carvin kit, and looking for advice on the pickups.

You can do a dual humbucker with center single coil. Will this get me a sound that will sound good with open chords on hymns (worship band) and also allow me to get a little dirt on the powerchord songs?

What kind of amp are you using?

I have a strat with a Seymour Duncan Custom humbucker in the bridge and a Vintage Rails single coil sized and sounding humbucker. It really sounds like a single coil but doesn't buzz. I'm a H-S-S guy, but that's because I'm really into the 'strat neck single coil blues sound' so I gotta have it.

I was considering H-S-H for a second guitar, but the other day I played a couple and found that I didn't like the neck humbucker sound when I played up high on the neck on the bass strings. It was too undefined or something compared to what I'm used to.

But this was Guitar Center so maybe the pickups were not adjusted correctly? It was a neck through rear-routed strat with Duncan pickups (JB bridge and '59 neck I think) and an Epiphone Les Paul into a Marshall tube amp.

Choose pickups for thier tone and use external gain (in the amp or in a pedal) to boost the output if you need more distortion.

Paul.