Re: Black winter vs distortion
My Charvel SoCal (which has Distortions) is pretty similar spec-wise (alder body, maple neck, FR). It's a killer for thrash metal, it's the closest I get to that bone-dry in-your-face Reign in Blood sound, but it's somewhat limited. You can do clean and crunch with it, but you can always hear it's a metal pickup. The sound isn't very open, don't know how to call it, it's mid-heavy, tight, compressed, or something. The clean sound is on the dry, harsh side, similar to what you know from clean parts on thrash metal albums, I can't get any more "classic", juicy clean sounds out of it. Crunch is similar, it works, but is pretty dry and harsh.
Another thing is that I don't like the Distortion neck, it's just too muffled for my liking, but then, thrash metal isn't known for using the neck a lot anyway. You might want to use a guitar's neck for lush blues solos and such, but with its dry tightness it's crap for that too. Overall, in my opinion the Distortion neck is fairly useless. A neck pickup with tone characteristics for a metal style that doesn't use neck pickups. In my opinion!
The BW is MUCH more versatile. It's very bright and open, almost like a single coil, only that it's a high output humbucker. First choice for black metal, not quite as good for thrash as the Distortion, but it gives you lovely, rich clean and crunch sounds. I find it excellent for overdriving a valve amp's clean channel to give you some sweet vintage blues sound. Mind that the bridge is very bright, maybe a bit too bright for some. The neck however is absolutely brilliant, for everyone I imagine. I used to be someone who only uses the bridge pickup, but the BW neck has sparkling highs that give it an overall very balanced, full sound, excellent for clean and blues, and even some fatter high gain riffing (think Black Sabbath). It opened my eyes for how good a neck pickup can be.
So: Distortion if thrash is what you really want, BW if you want great versatility. The Distortion excels at 80s metal sound, the BW covers a much wider range from vintage to modern, clean and high gain.
In theory, BW neck + Distortion bridge should be a killer combo, but I haven't tried that yet. But I'm considering replacing the Charvel's neck with a BW, that should make it much more versatile while still keeping it a badass thrash machine with the Distortion bridge. Maybe that's what you're looking for too, but again, I haven't tried it.
