Hoping this topic engages plenty of debate from forum members as it is such a personal one.

I must confess that 6 out of 7 builds no longer have the standard kit supplied pickups installed. The only one to escape an upgrade was the ES1 as they sounded pretty good for that style of guitar and anything hotter might have taken away the character of a traditional semi hollow body guitar.

The reason for mentioning this is that I have tried using standard kit pickups first before upgrading on all except my EX1 where I knew it had to have something scorching hot to go with the look and image that a guitar like that projects hence why I chose a set of Tonerider Alnico 4's. Looked long and hard and listened to all their sound demo's online before selecting Alnico 4 which to me had the perfect frequency range I was after. Happy to say they are awesome and money well spent and will have to get around to doing a sound demo video one day.

When considering upgrading pickups there are so many choices and price points that it can be difficult to narrow down exactly what might work and sound the way you expect. On one of these other upgrade threads Marcel made a few good points about giving stock parts a try before upgrading and I tend to agree. It is so easy to spend plenty of money on bits and pieces and sometimes it may become brand snobbery that influences you.

I was guilty of this back in the 1980's when Di Marzio were the 'must have' pickups IMO. In hindsight the super distortion II's that were dropped in my Ibanez Explorer copy were not as good as their Super Distortions which had a more lush mid range sound compared to the brighter and harsher SD II's. Blackface vs Cream also appealed the young 18 y/old that I was back then and became sucked in by form over function. By that I mean look and styling plus brand reputation rather than how they actually sounded. And to add more to that topic when I bought the guitar 2nd hand it had the SD II in bridge position and a genuine Gibson PAF in neck position. Stupid me rarely used neck position but thought I need to have matching PUP's and tossed the PAF or gave it away, can't remember but sad I never knew just how good it could have sounded, all because of my youthful ignorance.

A few decades later finds me enjoying this GAS kit building addiction and trying to stick to a modest budget on each build so that I can afford to do more than just 1 or 2. Most expensive build so far was the EX1 which came in around $500 - $600 including genuine Epiphone hard case and the EX5 is not far behind that due mostly to the cost of upgraded pickups.

I will do separate posts on the reasons behind PUP upgrades for each Guitar and Bass and invite you all to add as much as you like about your own experiences too.