I've a Les Paul deluxe with the mini humbuckers. I've already done mods to allow single/dual coil switching and phase inversion. I also have built in (squeezed in) an MXR Dyna-Comp compressor which i can switch in or out, so there is already a battery in there in case I need to add more active circuitry. Now I love the sound of this guitar... I'm a big fan of Dickey Betts and the Alman bros, the neck pickup has always given me the nice thick middle tone, and the mini humbuckers always seemed to add a little more high end, which is easy to tune out if i don't want it. So this is my starting point.

But one tonal lack I have always had with this guitar, is that the nice mellow middle tone, though great for what i want when soloing, has a way of making the lower (wound) strings less crisp then I'd like when I play chords, even with a new set. The unwound strings though are always nice and crisp! In fact i recently switched to a set with heavier bottom strings in an attempt to get more harmonic content. Helped some, but not much. The trouble, of course, is that anything I do to add treble starts to make the high (unwound) strings too shrill. Or I can uses an equalizer or parametric to take out some of the low middle frequencies, but that's still dancing around the problem.

I have some ideas I'm going to try, such as adding in the bridge pickup, and physically adjusting it so its mostly picking up the low strings. then, maybe adding a simple active op-amp based mixer circuit, to combine the pickups without allowing them to load each other down. There may be no real solution here, but it never hurts to ask other creative folks. :-)