Ceri, thank you as always for your compliments.

Hey Martian: amongst many other things I'm remembering the pickup advice you gave to oldguy. Excellent recommendations, and a very happy player as a result! That's what forums are for.

Cheers - C

Hi chromeface: I bet the reason for the rails pickup at the neck is to make space for Satriani's plectrum. Which is another problem with smothering a 24 fret guitar in pickups.

Hi again Toppscore. Don't want to bombard you over this, but just for the sake of the discussion... I think the Super Distortion 3 is the root of your problem. You started this thread complaining of not getting enough treble - and the SD3 is at the bottom of that. It's a pickup that is designed for one thing only: chugging away on muted low strings and advanced lickification in the form of single note runs up the dusty end of the fingerboard. Nuttin' else. It's just never going to sound good for anything other than shredding.
Exactly. That's what the SD3 is built for. Your problem is that none of these pickups really belong in this guitar. The Humbucker From Hell is designed to make a Les Paul sound as clean and trebly as possible - and so belongs nowhere near a gain-driven shred machine.
There's another issue that nobody's mentioned yet. Many guitars in widely different genres have just one pickup. The reason for having more pickups is to sense the string in different places and so produce different tones. However. Your guitar has a two octave / 24 fret neck. That immediately pushes the pickups closer together, reducing the tonal difference they can achieve.
In truth, there seems little reason to have more than two pickups on a 24 fret guitar, which appears to be the conclusion many players have come to:

The only possible reason I can see for having three pickups on this sort of instrument is to do that HSH thang, which the likes of Steve Vai have made "as prevalent as fly crap" (as a great man has written ). And that's certainly what the builder of your guitar decided and why he routed the pickup cavities the way he did. Like HSH setups or not, that's what this guitar was built to do.
So to extend what Martian said, I think you need to start from the ground up. Remove the SD3 to a one-pickup metal guitar, save the Humbucker From Hell for a jazz flavoured Les Paul or similar and use the 12K GFS in the bridge position of an SSS Strat that you want to convert for powerful lead tones.
And then begin again and discover two well-matched humbuckers and a single-coil to go between them for this guitar.
I don't really know HSH setups so I can't advise on which pickups to go for. If it were me I'd go away and study the sets they put on HSH guitars, or better still I'd see if Mr Martian has some thoughts. I have the strangest instinct he doesn't really like HSH configs, and yet I also strongly suspect he knows what would work very well if that's what a guy was asking for. He's a gentleman who knows pickups!
By the way, Toppscore, I don't think you've told us what your guitar actually is? Care to show us the headstock, so's we can see what we're dealing with? Whatever; it's a mighty pretty blue burst flame maple top, so congrats on that. Cheers - C

What is a Warmouth Stratocaster, I did not know they sold guitars. I thought they only sold parts.

Looking Back on the first page, 1st pic of the guitar....

Why not just rewire only 2 HB's with single to dual coil, plus the choice of either coil when in single mode.
That will give you the quack you seek depending on which wiring configuration.

I'm sure Martian would give you a schematic for an optimal 2 HB set-up. ( Say Please )

For so called Metal/Rock....I'm referring to Michael Schenker, George Lynch, Vinnie Moore, Yngwie Malmsteen, Mathias Jabs, EVH (early)
Earlier would be Ronnie Montrose...Anyway, a melodic albeit heavily distorted sound..but one where you can easily distinguish the notes unlike some of the more recent " Affreux-JO-JO "
I will swear by the HSS set up as being the most versatile, hence 2 of my Strats have this configuration but different.
Stratopartster II is 2 vintage singles and 1 HB with single to dual coil switching ( Vol Push Pull )
and 2 TBX tone pots with 220k caps.
Stratopartster III is 2 Carvin HII and a M22 HB, 1 Volume, 1 TBX Tone, 1 coil splitter switch. I will update at some point in the Build section.
The other Strats are various single coils, but I will stack the Stratopartster II and III against anyone's for a comparison of sound, proving that 50% of the stuff out there is just overpriced and falsely marketed....As I said before you don't need to spend that much money to get the sound you want.....

6) Then investigate if I can split the two neck/bridge humbuckers = "TBX Style"

TBX allows you greater tone range by adjusting treble or bass but they don't split dual coils to single for that you need a Push/Pull Volume or/and DP/DT switches. Or at least that is what I understand from point #6.

This is my opinion only but when it comes to multiple pickups I have always preferred a Master Volume and Master Tone Pot...the benefit is that it free's up a space so that if you are rocking 2 HB's, now there is a place to install that DP/DT switch without additional holes....

LiveWire humbuckers are active beasts like EMGs.
These Dave Mustaine-endorsed humbuckers had the active, 9-volt-powered preamp built into the pickup, providing the benefits of an active pickup without sacrificing the famous, organic, "Seymourized" tone. Great for classic rock, punk, garage, thrash, old school metal, nu-metal, black metal and other heavy rock and aggressive music styles.

DiMarzio Super Distortion are regular passive humbuckers.
These pickups started a sound revolution. Replacement pickups simply didn’t exist before the invention of the Super Distortion® in the early 1970s. The Super Distortion® (and its original 3-conductor version, the Dual Sound®) was the first pickup specifically designed to kick a tube amp into total overdrive, and is still the standard by which all other high-output pickups are measured. The Super Distortion® has a perfect blend of power and tone: both single-notes and chords jump out of the amp and fill the room (or the track) with a wall of sound. The balance of tones is classic — thick, boosted mids, big lows and fat highs. This is the sound you’ve heard for over three decades on platinum records, from players as varied as Ace Frehley, Al Di Meola, Dave Murray and Paul Gilbert. It’s also versatile: 4-conductor wiring allows instant access to Strat®-like split and series-parallel modes. Discover what thousands of great players know: the Super Distortion® is the best all ’round high-power pickup ever made.