Re: Duncan JB magnet swap to ceramic.
I agree with the OP's description of the JB's tone. It is not an inherently trebly or articulate pickup. It's kind of a blunt instrument: all grunt and honk. A nice thick wall of sound tone if you have an amp with enough headroom, and you are a somewhat lighthanded player, but otherwise, I can't stand it. I am a heavy handed player who plays with thick strings, quiet pickups, and low-headroom amps most of the time. I use my right hand a lot to change what sound I'm getting, and that just doesn't work well for me with a JB. For me, a JB, or any pickup in that vein, hits the amp too hard and compresses it too much. I'd need to relearn how to play and change all my amps to get the best out of a JB.
I don't think the mag swap will help much, based on my own experiences swapping mags into pickup that is similar to the JB. In one case, I took a 500T, which has three ceramic magnets in it (and which, to me, sounded very similar to a JB) through a series of mags, all the way down to an A3 (a quite weak magnet), and the tone differences were negligible. It got ever so slightly better, but its inherent problems were not really changed that much. IME, the more winds a pickup has, the less mag swaps seem to affect the "home base" tone of the pickup. You'd think it would be the opposite, but I have not found that to be true in all my mag swapping.
I would try the Duncan Custom or the Screamin' Demon. They are great middle ground between a Seth/'59/A2P/PG/etc. and a JB. They have the additional heat and punch over P.A.F. types, but without going into that honky, thick JB territory.
