The default Ibanez pickups in this guitar made way for a trio of DiMarzios: Fusion Edge (b) / Cruiser (m) / Air Norton (n). I'm a Seymour Duncan fan but do not dismiss DiMarzio pickups; they are good but not appealing to my kind of music. The DiMarzios here are essentially exiled pickups, quite forgotten so to speak because they performed poorly elsewhere to such an extent that I lost faith in them.
Not so in this case. The Fusion Edge, for instance sounds muffled, with poor bass definition but in this guitar, it gives off that pleasant grisliness most suitable for bottom end chugging. The Cruiser - I dislike it because it's so single coil-ish, it fails to perform well under high gain settings but somehow, in this S270, it can pull off that high octane single coil distortion tone without the excessive single coil clunkiness. Air Norton - I thought it's just a slight variation of the Norton which I really like but it's very PAF with vintage vibes aplenty. I'm not into that kind of responses, it's all out attack for me which the Air Norton failed to complement but strangely in this instrument, it has a very Seymour Duncan '59 vibe to it with clarity to boot. These forsaken pickups, I'm really glad I held on to them. That's the least I could say.
