If you've seen Steve Vai play in the last few years, you may have seen him playing an Ibanez Jem guitar with the word "Pogo" taped on the face. Steve wanted one of his instruments to have a fat, classic humbucker sound to contrast with the hotter, screaming Evolution -equipped guitars. These are the pickups we developed for him. The neck pickup is a bit louder and fatter-sounding than the PAF Pro pickups that Steve used on his earliest Jems. The bridge pickup is not as hot as the Evolution , but it's got a warm and punchy mid-range coupled with a fat low end that rolls off before it can get muddy. Harmonics are easy to get, and the 4-conductor wiring coil enables cool "notch tone" coil-splitting.

The Breed was designed to warm up and smooth out the sound of 25 1/2 scale trem guitars. It's got a lot more power than a PAF , but it also has a finer "touch" than high-output models. Picking hard will generate a lot of voltage, but a softer attack will clean up the sound of an overdriven amp.