Best inexpensive Pickup for Clean Sounds?

[Dominik Gräber]

I was thinking about gearing Up my first guitar, an Ibanez, to make it better for using Clean Tones.
Most of the time I am playing Metal stuff I’ve memorized but now that I am attempting more guitar theory I might want to try Out other musical directions.
This is why I am curious which Pickup you would recommend me for not too much Money.
At the Moment I am playing an Epiphone LP with EMGs.

 

[idssdi]

Tbh honest I’m not familiar with all the different pickups at all. What I usually do for my clean the tone is delay/reverb and split my humbucker into Single coils (for whatever reason I usually prefer the clean sound of single coils) and roll off the tone knob a bit(basically taking out some the treble)
I know this is not exactly your question but I hope it helps anyway

 

[Dominik Gräber]

Yes @Ids I hear that often that singlecoils are prefered when it comes to clean sound, but thanks for the tip

 

[Josh Wright]

It depends, so a neck pickup will give a smoother sound typically and it has less gain on the pickup itself, Seymour Duncan has this thing where you can input everything you want and your rig, and it’ll recommend pickups to you.

 

[Dominik Gräber]

Thanks @josh, I’ll give this a try!

 

[Matt Wildman]

I’d say any pickup made by fender or even some of the PRS pickups would give you nice clean tones ☺ granted PRS may be more expensive than fender though

 

[Noah Berends]

Since tone is pretty subjective you might get a lot of different answers from us, so Josh’s suggested tool is probably your best bet. I personally really like clean tones from EMG pickups especially the 57/66 and Het sets, so I would’ve suggested that since you already have them, but most stuff from Duncan would also give some really good tones.

 

[Ed Seith]

At this point in time, most pickups out there will be capable of reproducing nice clean tones, even if a little adjustment to the volume knob is necessary, even the EMGs – Hetfield gets plenty of clean mileage out of his EMGs.
That said, EMGs are “active” pickups. They have special electronics and a battery that guitars without active pickups (most) don’t have. Swapping pickups to passive (non-active) will be a bigger deal than just changing the pickups. You’d need to swap out the volume and/or tone pots as well, and pull the battery from the wiring.
You might do better to turn the guitar’s volume down a bit (maybe 8.5-9 – that’s all) and tweak your amp for a better clean tone until you can afford to buy another guitar to go alongside the one you have.
One can NEVER have “too many guitars.”

 

[Dominik Gräber]

@Ed what I said was misleading, I am using my Epiphone as a main guitar, but also have an ibanez, which is not in use anymore because it can not compete at all with the emgs in my LP. So I would modify my Ibanez with new single Coils.