Pickup height is probably the biggest modification you can make to a guitar's sound. All for the cost of a screwdriver

Dunno about you but I favour as flat a eq out of my pickups as possible. I don't want em biased to either treble or bass. Then I look to the pickup heights and angles to set the guitar for what I intend to use it for. For example the SCN's on my Clapton modded MIM are set very differently to the SCN's on my Hotrod, the SCN's on my Deluxe are set very differently to the other two guitars.
They all have different applications and are set to suit.

As long as you don't go setting em too high, so the magnets pull the strings, theres really no rules. Just prefrences. When I had Vintage Noiseless pickups in my MIM, I had em set flush to the pickguard. The guitar didn't suffer for it mainly because of the powerfull mid boost.

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No no and no

I'm a big fan of low-output single coil pickups in my Strats and set quite low. The amplifier does a lot of the work in terms of volume, distortion, tone, etc ...

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Member #26797
My other guitar is a Strat.

We´re here talking guitars, i speak with sound, i give examples of tone with my own music that I know some of u will dig. The future looks promising.

This one is an example of the brightness of cheap Squiers, combined with the 60 Relic (Ice Bird). The theme of the song is a desert patrol persecution, some dude doing 300kmh on a motorcycle.

http://soundcloud.com/dr-joyitas/petrol-biznaga-turbo