There are many neck pups that have been used with great success...59, A2P, Jazz, Pearly Gates, etc.
I'm not really sure what you are asking here. Are you talking about 2 pups with unequal outputs, or 1 pup with coils that have unequal outputs? The C/59 has coils with unequal outputs and lends itself very well to splitting. If you use a C/59 for the bridge pup, you could split to either the 59 coil (for lower output) or the Custom coil (for higher output).
So, looking at all of those, none of it is simple....LOL. At least not to me. Simple = Volume, Tone, 3-way blade or toggle switch. Neck, Neck+Bridge, Bridge. No splitting, no parallel, no combining coils. Straight up pickup switching and all noise cancelling.
I've done the fancy wiring before and found out that I never used any more than 3 of the settings anyway so I prefer to keep it simple. My Les Paul is the only guitar that has coil-splitting and that is because it came that way (push/pull volume controls).
I don't disagree one bit. 5-way blade really is the best overall approach for most people, in my opion.
I can deal with more knobs and complexity, and I find that an important thing for me is separate controls for the bridge and for the neck, so no dancing is required when switching between them. I realized that's why I like LP controls so much, and I think any splitting/etc/etc is probably best when it only affects one pickup at a time. I've noticed that PRS tend to be wired this way, whether using mini switches or push-pulls, and I think that's why.
I'll just start off with saying that I play with medium gain and I hate hum.
With that in mind, I'm wondering what the simplest wiring might be to get the following modes while avoiding as much redundancy as possible and not having any non-hum-cancelling positions. I know this might not be possible, but an ideal load out would be:
I feel like this is approaching Jimmy Page wiring, but would like something simpler if possible and I'm also happy to skip the single coil neck and single coil bridge modes.
- Series neck
- Series both
- Series bridge
- Outer singles
- Inner singles
- Parallel neck (if possible)
- Parallel bridge (if possible)
The Charvel DK24 has something very close that I duplicated in my Ibanez. It requires a super switch and a 4 pull mini toggle and I would not call it simple but it's about as simple as it's going to get to do what you want