I had a similar experience with
@Cable_Clamp with my Midnight Rider HT.
tl:dr; I tried a bunch of pickups and came back to the original HTs. I also made some visual mods.
I bought mine used off Reverb in late '23. It came with a scratchy volume pot which the seller neglected to mention. When I was taking the volume / tone / preamp board out to inspect it, one of the pickup connections on the preamp board came off. Since I bought it used, EBMM's warranty didn't apply. I ordered a new one for $175 and had to send in the old broken one first. Thankfully I got $200 back from Reverb thanks to their buyer protection policies. I replaced the new one myself and finally got to spend some time playing it.
I came to the same conclusion about the HT pickups - super hot, nice low end on open chugs (I play in drop C), but if I dug in hard with palm mutes on anything other than open C, there was a compression and overtone that I didn't like. I decided to swap out the bridge HT pickup with a Duncan JB I had on hand, and the process, the same connection point on the new PCB board came off! So instead of paying for another PCB assembly, I just decided to remove it altogether and replace it with traditional hand-wired pots and capacitor. I wanted to try out the HT pickups again with the traditional pots and wiring, so I put the original bridge back in. It sounded much better without the buffer, but it still wasn't exactly what I was looking for. It still had that weird compression quality I didn't love.
So for the next year or so, I tried out a bunch of different pickup sets.
- Bare Knuckle True Grit: Had the mids the HT pickups were missing, but didn't have the beefy low end I wanted.
- Bare Knuckle Black Hawk: sounded great, but I had another guitar with Black Hawks, and I wanted something different. Also, the pickups were white, and after a while I didn't love the look with the all black guitar.
- Seymour Duncan Custom 5 + Jazz: another set I had on hand in my parts bin. Jazz sounded great as always, but the Custom 5 didn't. It was also lacking midrange growl and bite.
- Suhr Doug Aldrich: They basically sounded like a better version of the Custom 5 + Jazz combo. Beefy, but still lacking in mids and character. And really not that hot.
I finally got sick of messing with it, so I just put the stock HT pickups back in. They sounded great. In the meantime, I had been working a lot on my right hand picking technique, and wasn't picking as hard as I had been when I first got the guitar. I wasn't getting the weird compression and "active" sound that I did originally. I think the HTs are just really responsive to pick pressure, and I was originally just picking waaaay to hard.
I also made some visual mods. I really wish EBMM would have used some powder coated black parts instead of gloss black, or at least made the gold flake in the Midnight Rider finish a bit larger. Unless the guitar is in the perfect light, it kinda looks like a black hole with fingerprints. I was considering changing the pickup covers, but then decided to do some aging with a scotch brite pad instead. I lightly aged the bridge, tailpiece, and pickguard screws so they have more texture. I brushed the control plate so it looks more like the powder coated black plates they use on other some of the other BFR stingrays. And I brushed off all the black paint from the pickup covers, so they have a nice brushed nickel look. So, now I'm really happy with the sound and the look. I think it's my favorite guitar now.
