EMG 89R Black

I purchased this pickup to go alongside the EMG 81TW pickup in my Epiphone gothic explorer. I wanted the EMG 81-85 set up with a slight twist, the twist being i wanted to coil split the pickups for clean and emulated acoustic sounds.
In one word, WOW, this pickup is fantastic. This pickup takes the 85 and makes it able to coil split, the R version has the single coil at the top of the pickup instead of the base. The reason why i chose the 89R over the 89 was the single coil will have more bass than the 89 would, the closer the pickup is to the centre of the neck the bassier the response.
Under distortion its a dirty nasty fantastically tight pickup that made a great black metal sound when alternate picking single strings. I found that it doesn't respond to clean too well, that is to say there was still a fuzzyness around the sound so crystal clean was not possible, however when coil split the clean was a nice fat round tone, made the acoustic simulator on my pre-amp sound amazing, great live, great in the studio.
EMG's simple solder-less set up made installing this pickup easy.

Forget the typical 81-85 set up, make that classic EMG tone more flexible without loosing any of the original tone. get the 81TW and then get either this 89R or the 89. you wont regret it.

in common with the EMG 89, this pickup is excellent, but this is the neck version.
It too is dual mode: it does the classic EMG 85 sound, but when you use the included push/pull pot to switch the mode, it switches to a very convincing EMG SA sound - the most single-coil like split I have heard on any pickup. The difference with the 89R is that the single coil position is in the furthest position from the bridge, so you get that strat neck pickup sound much more effectively than if you simply used another 89 - which has the single coil split nearer to the bridge.

The only complaint I have with this pickup is that the split is so effective, that the level is a little quieter, and the tone is as bright as if you switched to an SA pickup, it would be nice if you did not have to change the volume and tone positions quite so much to continue, but that's personal preference.

What is worth considering is that this pickup is 10 Euros less than the 89, so you could consider buying 2 of these if you were cutting cost