Re: Choosing three pickups for MIM ("Roland Ready")
I'm not a big fan of bridge low output single coil tones, at least in the standard slant where treble strings are transformed into icepick eardrum assaults. As Hendrix fans know, reverse pickup slant fixes most of that. But different people hear things differently, and tastes (and sensitivity to particular frequencies of sound) vary. Higher output bridge singles help a lot as well.
[I'm not criticizing Leo Fender for the original design choice, he made it to make the guitar cut through for a very different band arrangement than became common later.]
If your tastes run similarly to mine and the guitar is routed with a swimming pool route or for HSS/HSH, you might consider a pickguard with a reverse (lefty) slant on the bridge pickup if you stick with a single size in the bridge position.
But as I mentioned, I'm assuming/recommending an autosplit so you preserve as much as possible of the bridge+middle and/or middle+neck paired singles tone, those are more important to a lot of guitarists than the middle pickup by itself!
By the way, if you go with a full sized side-by-side humbucker, you probably want a TB [TremBucker/Fender] spacing for the bridge. Neck always uses neck/SH. "Standard Humbucker" referring to original Gibson spacing as standard, though that's no longer true as even Gibson has wider string spacing on non-reproduction models now.
I'm not a big fan of bridge low output single coil tones, at least in the standard slant where treble strings are transformed into icepick eardrum assaults. As Hendrix fans know, reverse pickup slant fixes most of that. But different people hear things differently, and tastes (and sensitivity to particular frequencies of sound) vary. Higher output bridge singles help a lot as well.
[I'm not criticizing Leo Fender for the original design choice, he made it to make the guitar cut through for a very different band arrangement than became common later.]
If your tastes run similarly to mine and the guitar is routed with a swimming pool route or for HSS/HSH, you might consider a pickguard with a reverse (lefty) slant on the bridge pickup if you stick with a single size in the bridge position.
But as I mentioned, I'm assuming/recommending an autosplit so you preserve as much as possible of the bridge+middle and/or middle+neck paired singles tone, those are more important to a lot of guitarists than the middle pickup by itself!
By the way, if you go with a full sized side-by-side humbucker, you probably want a TB [TremBucker/Fender] spacing for the bridge. Neck always uses neck/SH. "Standard Humbucker" referring to original Gibson spacing as standard, though that's no longer true as even Gibson has wider string spacing on non-reproduction models now.
