software

I pulled out the old Artist this morning. It's probably an AR50. The neck pup is probably a stock 1980 Ibanez pup. The scant 'net research I did suggests it's a Super 70 or Super 58. The low strings are muddy and soft, the high strings are thin and icepicky. I tried raising and lowering the pup, and raising and lowering the polepieces, none of which seemed to help. If there is a way to brighten up the low strings and fatten up the high strings with polepiece and height adjustments, should the polepieces go up or down, and should the pup go up or down?

FWIW, the bridge pup is probably a Gibson 57 plus, as it had a Gibson color code, has no labels, one slug coil, one screw coil, and meters at 9.1K with equal coils. It had the tubby low strings and thin high strings, but to a much lesser degree. It sounded better after I adjusted the bridge pickup's E and B string polepieces down a bit, E and A polepieces up a bit and set the height.

(and the final solution will be new pups, but thought I'd tweak the ones in there to see what it does)

Lowering the pick on the low/high string side could reduce the muddiness on the low strings and make the tone on the high strings warmer. I think polepieces may be more for making all the strings have similar volumes.