Coil taping and pickup output

[Wayne27]

Will a coil tap (to reduce output) help make a hot pickup better for blues and classic rock?

I’m thinking about getting Ibanez RG421HPFM.

 

[JB_From_Hell]

Maybe. Some people use hotter pickups, like the JB, Custom, Distortion, Air Zone, Super Distortion, etc... for those as is and they’re fine.

Your amp and drive pedals are more important, and you can always roll back the volume knob on any pickup a bit.

 

[eclecticsynergy]

You can also wire a pickup so one coil is only partially disabled.
Search "resistor split" and "partial split."

 

[Mincer]

A tap on a single coil pickup will reduce the output by wherever the tap actually is. A split of a humbucker can do the same thing, but is a different electrical process. Both a split and a tap will reduce the output but in different ways.