[hctaw]

It makes a big difference if you have a good amp that doesn't have a dull preamp stage. Some of the newer tube designs are extremely responsive to a change in how they're loaded (same goes for all the shitty unbuffered drive pedals that inexplicably sound good).

In my rig I have an SSH guitar with a higher output neck and bridge with a coil tap and run it straight into a blackstar HT40. The pickup selection and volume knob give me all my clean/dirty/overdriven tones without pedals, so there's less noise and less that can fail. It would be really hard to achieve that without the time I spent to find a set of pickups that works.