2PCS Ceramic Magnet Invader Style Guitar Humbucker Pickup Bridge & Neck (Black+Red)

First off I have to say that I am a certified Luthier and have been building and repairing guitars for about 6 years now and have been playing guitar professionally since I was a teenager. The first pickup I ever bought was an Invader... I must admit I didn't expect much from these but figured for the price I really wasn't taking too big a chance. Well... I was blown away. They have the exact same wire color code as the Duncans they are cloning and if you didn't know better you would swear they were the same thing. I installed them in an LTD EX model that needed some love and chose to add a couple mini toggle coil split switches for each pickup. Not only does the dirty tone SCREAM... the clean tones are very articulate and clear. I feel like a traitor having been a devoted Duncan user for years but man... these things are tough to beat. Have it mod geeks!

I am going to go over how I wax potted these pickups, for those of you who have bought this pickup and realized they squeal with too much feedback once installed. Just for the fact that these are not wax potted, I am giving it 4 stars. Other than that, once you wax pot them, they sound AMAZING! The bridge pickup sounds just like my Seymour Duncan SH-8 that i have installed on my Ibanez!To start off, I bought a thing of Gulf Wax from my local grocery store. You can use Paraffin wax as well, it would just have to be melted at a lower temperature than what I used. Generally, you can use any wax you want, meaning you can use up the leftover candles in your house if you so dare (I would not recommend crayons). I took a pot of water which I heated up to around 150 degrees. I had a thermometer on hand to do this with and I recommend that you use one to make sure you do not ruin your pickup. I crafted myself a can to hold the wax in out of a 16 oz. soda can by cutting off the top to the point where it does not bevel. I had put around enough wax in the can to where it was approximately 3/4 full of melted wax. For my setup using the melted Gulf Wax, it was at around 160 degrees, but I would not go any higher than that. I then held the pickups in place and submerged it in the wax once it was all melted. I held it in the wax by the wire for about 10 minutes to make sure that the wax would penetrate the copper coils of the pickup. After 10 minutes, I took the pickups out and let them dry out on a paper towel with the top of the pickup facing down. Once it was cool enough, I wiped off any excess wax from the top and the back of the pickup. I repeated this process with the other pickup and I let both of them sit for about an hour or until it was cool to the touch.I hope this review helps some people. If you need another example on this process, you can look up how to waxpot pickups on YouTube.The image that follows are the pickups after being installed into a Fender Squire Jazzmaster

I changed the stock pu's out of my RG321. There are the cheaper Powersound type that Ibanez throws in.These pickups for lack of a better way of saying it, are clearer. The low end seems to be not as muddy as the stock pu's.And they scream better then stock as well.I did Wax pot them right out of the shipping package as well.I bought a $3 mainstays non-scented candle at walmart. Took a large sauce pan and a old beef stew canand made my own wax melter. I put the tin can on old metal lids in the sauce pan with water and melted the wax.Then dipped those after market PU's into the wax for about 5 min.On a Ibanez RG. You will have to drill out your humbucker mount rings adjustment screw holes to the next size as the stock screws will not work on the replacement PU's. Ibanez uses a small Humbucker adjustment screw that will not fit these. No biggie and literally 5 min fix. (Takes longer to find the damn drill and bit then to drill out the holes)I bought the Black and White versions of these. And put them in my Modded Ibanez RG321.And while I did receive these pickups earlier then the expected date. They were still way behind my other parts in this order. But they did come from China and had to go through customs and all that. 2 weeks in transit is not bad considering.These pickups definitely scream. I am still dialing in my amp.Neck Pickup the "E" up to "G" power chords are a bit to mid ranged for some reason. It may be the amp itself. (Which I had setup to the old PU's) This is not a issue on the Bridge PU. And indeed I may have to revisit my wiring and tinker with it. I followed the included diagram for Ibanez switches, but others report that you can follow Seymore Duncans diagrams. Changing the pots and switch may also yield a better change in tone as well. As I am running 500k pots and a 0.047uf orange drop cap with Slinky 9's.One more note. With my RG321, I had to adjust (Bend) the humbucker mount "ears" a little bit. They were about 1/16th to wide for the humbucker routes in my fiddle. I used a small set of needle nose pliers to adjust this. And they mounted fine after that.Update: After adjusting my amp some. And adjusting the height of the pickups away from the strings. Yielded a improvement to over all neck pickup bass side clarity. One more thing that also helped. I removed the parallel jumper from pole "B" and "Y" (represented as a Black jumper wire in the pic I uploaded here) Then since I like the sound, I further Isolated the Necks south finish wire from the "Y" pole and combined it with the White North Finish on the "Z" stud/pole. This yields Single coil on position 4 (P4 in the diagram) instead of Parallel Humbucker. Which I much prefer as there was not a Huge difference in the sound of P4 and P5. On my RG321. Now I have single coil on P2 and P4 With blaze it 420 in P1/P3/P5.Now there is a huge difference not just a meh....its a tad different.