My main guitar is a Standard Strat with old school Carvin pickups. It's got a great clean and light distortion sound, but obviously can't play anything heavy. I bought an Ibanez RG3EXFM1 (lower-mid level RG) with meh passive pickups to use for heavy rhythm stuff (a lot of Metallica), but after a couple years I'm a bit dissatisfied with the muddiness of the sound. I figure my two options are to get a new guitar or get new pickups for my Ibanez. The guitars I'm considering are an ESP LTD EC-401FM, a Schecter Damien 6 Elite, and an Epiphone Prophesy Les Paul. Or, should I just use my money to buy a set of EMG Het Set pickups and put them in my Ibanez? That's definitely the cheaper option, but I'm not sure if the guitar itself is good enough for those pickups. Just wanted to put some feelers out there and see what y'all thought. Also, let's not make this a brand debate, let's focus on whether any of those guitars would be a substantially better option than modding my Ibanez.
Prob best thing to do is go to a music store and play through a few different guitars and amps ... take a few weeks to do this, keep going back. Eventually you'll start to gravitate towards a particular tone and once that happens, you can determine what kind of pickups you like most and so forth.
