Making a short story long....
I bought this guitar a few years ago, but I never ended up playing it much until now. It was my first Ibanez JEM style guitar, not a true JEM but an RG conversion. I honestly went to check it out due to the paint job, a pink and purple swirl. Someone in the area was doing the painting and monkey handle routing, and replacing the necks. It was the paint job that got me. I knew I had to have it, and the neck was very playable, even though I knew it needed some attention. Overall, a decent guitar, but it still needed some TLC.
I bought it, played it a little bit, but then things started to fall apart. Metal shims were used under the locking nut, they slipped out and I sliced up my fingers and thumb pretty bad on that. The bindings on the neck peeled away. The fret job was not smooth, and I cut up my fingers and thumb on the edges of the frets pretty bad too. The pickups on the guitar were not great (Stock V7/V8 pickups) which are not horrible, but I knew this guitar could deliver more. It sounded better unplugged than plugged in, so I knew it had some serious potential.
Now, nearly three years later, it is playable again. That's a long time, but I do not really like working on guitars, but I do my own work, mostly because I have only found one other person who does the work the way I like it, and I learned from him. Also, I got used to shorter scale LP style guitars, and this became more of a "rainy day nothing else to do and bored with Netflix" type of project for me. But, over the course of time, I did fixed it up.
First up was fixing the bindings on the neck. I finished peeling them off from where they were, cleaned it up, and re-glued them on. Next up was the frets. They did not need a full redressing, just a minor sanding and polishing to take the edge off the ends. Then the metal shims, just a bit of affixing them correctly so they did not slide out from under the locking nut, no more sliced up fingers.
Finally, guitar fixed and playable, and on to the point of this post, the pickups. I don't know if anyone else experiences this, but this seems to happen for me. I will play, and record something, and the pickups are not sounding and responding the way I want, but if I listen to it later, I will think "That does not sound horrible" but it feels that way while playing at the time. The stock V7/V8s felt that way to me. But, I do not think the sound was horrendous.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-oifQKdwDgI did not like the way they felt though.
Over the years, I have gravitated (See what I did there? Gravity Storm? Gravitated? How fun is that?) towards Seymour Duncan pickups and a few models there. This time, I decided to go with a set of Dimarzio pickups, and looked at their offerings. I thought "Why not?" Ibanez and Dimarzio seem to go hand in hand, and given a JEM style go with a Vai style. The Gravity Storm were new at the time, and a bit different than the EVO pickups JEMs normally come with. Then it took awhile of searching, ordering and waiting to get the purple/black zebra style over plain black or white versions.
They are pretty hot pickups, a good bit hotter than I am used to. In comparison, I am more used to a medium hot pickup, like a Duncan Custom. Not bad, just different, and still working on setting up hight, and just how much to dig in. They sound a lot fatter/fuller than the stock V7/V8s that came with the guitar.
The low end is tight, but not overly so. Great for VH/Ratt/etc type pedal tones. Not sure how it would be for heavy shugga shugga type palm muting, but I don't do that much. Not quite as fat as my Duncan Custom Customs, but a bit tighter and more articulate.
Midrange is smooth, much like my Duncan Screamin' Demons. The high end is a bit smoother than those even.
Overall, I like them a lot. Very well balanced and not overbearing in any range. They are like a balance of my two favorites, the Custom Custom and Screamin Demon.
Hopefully I will get a chance to record with these soon.