I recently installed EMG's in two Strats, the SA and SA-X models. By themselves, I don't know that they're overly metal, but David Gilmour used the SA's, and though he's not metal, I think his tone works great for it, super smooth with percussive pick attack. But the real magic is the EMG SPC active mid boost that people pair with the Strat sets, which gives you a very rounded mid hump (because the mids are actually boosted, as opposed to a resonant peak being lowered), and it makes a Strat sound wildly fat when it's full open at "10", which I can tell you is great for metal. IMO, SA's with the SPC at 10 is effectively the same as a full sized humbucker.
I'd say that SA's with SPC mid boost is not completely unlike Hot Rails that can be parallel or series, for thin or fat tones. I'm amazed how "full size" Hot Rails can sound in series, but the nice thing about the active pickups is that the response is very linear and broad, because they're buffered internally, thus no high impedance runs, and the capacitance is super low, and all the tone shaping is deliberate, not an accidental characteristic as it is with passives. The whole thing about passives is that you're exploiting the resonance with the internal capacitance, sort of a happy accident. Active pickups start with a flat tone that is then deliberately attenuated, so if you look at it on a graph, the curves are much smoother, without the hard knees. The hard knee defines the "vintage tone", but for metal, or even crystal cleans, one can do better.
IMO, a lot more people would embrace active pickups for high gain and metal if not for the fact that they're associated with the 80's. I think a lot of the rationalizations around getting away from them has more to do with how they look and less about how they perform.
Last edited: Jul 17, 2020
