All user reviews of 3/5 for the Seymour Duncan SH-8B Invader Bridge

Seymour Duncan SH8 Invader. 3 ceramic magnets with 12 large hex pole pieces. It by no means a bad pickup, it's just is it what you want? I bought it mainly because ole Papa Hetfield had used one in his Electra V for Kill Em All and I wanted to have my go at somewhat copying that tone. And while it does get that distinct grind it's soo hard to control this pickup. It has so much bass that it's actually hard to keep it from getting muddy/ flubby. If you have multiple guitars with different pickups rest assured that you WILL have to change the settings if you use this pickup, so in my opinion that's a big con for playing live. Constantly having to tweak you amp.
Now there's many people who've used these with success and great tone, but I can't figure out how. In a thin bright guitar such as a Jackson, maple neck thru, ebony board, alder wings... this would be great to thicken it up a bit and give back some low end. But in a solid mahogany guitar it was too hard for me to get it where I wanted. I play faster paced metal where tightness and articulation is key so for me this was definitely not it. If you're playing more classic rock/metal, sludge, doom or styles that don't rely on speed and articulation as much then this might be a great pickup for you. It will make any guitar thicker and beefy but it'll really lose the definition. It’s also very aggressive so along with being muddy it doesn’t have good cleans. It’ll overdrive your amp too easily so getting sparkly cleans is a real challenge. If you don’t mind a somewhat clean/ light crunch tone then this may work for you, but in my experience a true clean tone was very hard to get.
So while it's a great pickup and does everything it's supposed to do, it's just not what I need or want.

I'm only going to review the sound I got by using this pickup through my distortion channel as I hardly ever use a bridge pickup clean. My main amp is a framus cobra 100 watt tube amp and I also use a peavey 5150 as well as a hughes & ketteer triamp

I tried this pickup in two different guitars and got similar results. I first tried it out in a epiphone LP custom which is one of the nicer Epi guitars and A great deal if you don't want to spend the gibson bucks. It has the typical LP construction with a mahogany body, maple neck, and rosewood fret board. In this guitar it was just muddy and grainy sounding. Normally a muddy pickup will just be overly bass heavy and can sometimes be corrected with a bass cut on the amp but this had flubby bass and shrill highs. Working the EQ controls to overcome one problem only seemed to accentuate the other. Metal playing friends of mine suggested I give it a shot but it was not at all like I expected. I thought maybe that guitar just wasn't the right kind for this pickup.

Next I tried it in my Carvin DC127 which has an alder and mahogany body with a maple neck and ebony fret board. This guitar is normally very tight sounding but even it was a bit undefined in the low end with the invader. The ebony board also adds to the brightness of the guitar so the high end from the invader was even more accentuated. Once again I could not use any amount of EQing to get a sound out of it that I liked.

Some people get great results with this pickup so maybe I got a dud or maybe it's just very picky about the woods and set up you have.