Hot Rodded

Hot Rodded

What pickups should i buy for my guitar?

i want to upgrade my pickups on my Westfield les paul copy. I play blues, rock and metal. i was thinking of putting seymour duncan jb and the bridge then jazz at the neck (hot rodded set) but will they give me metal tones? if not then i was thinking of replacing maybe the JB pickups with an EMG 81? would this give me both metal and rock to blues tones if i had a EMG 81 at the neck with a seymour duncan Jazz at the neck?
thank you

Hey Guitarkid...
You are mentioning 3 very different types of pickups. Someone mentioned not switching to active pickups (EMG's). Well, you can do that, but if you chose to have an active and passive pickup in the guitar, you would no longer be able to combine the sounds. For example, you would only be able to use the 3 way selector as a 2 way selector. Adding actives requires a decent amount of parts to be changed out such as pickup, jack, tone, volume, capacitor, and even installing a battery clip.
Its probably easiest, best, and cheapest to just stick with the passive pickups on your guitar. JB's are excellent pickups, however they are considered versatile. You can get great tones out of them clean, dirty, etc. If you are an exclusive metal player, you may want to look into some pickups designed for that specifically like Dimebuckers, Pearly Gates, Screamin Demons, DiMarzio Distortions, Liquifire, etc.
I have a Jazz pickup in the neck position of one of my guitars, and I don't like the way it sounds at all with distortion. It sounds very muddy and the tones are not distinct at all, but its sounds nice clean. I use my bridge pickups around 85% of the time, so to me, its important to have a great bridge pickup. A lot of the time I just leave the stock neck pickup in there because I use it so infrequently, or I just pick up something for around $30-$40 on Ebay.