Robbmonster said: Ok, Mr Kurdt, I think you have always confused PAF with EMG. Easy enough mistake to make I suppose.
The presence of 3 pickups doesn't automatically mean it's hot. Each pickup is what it is, and you could put in a thousand of them and none would be affected by the others.
As for how hot mine are, I'm not too sure. The neck pickup is the hottest, and the bridge pickup is the weakest. The neck is probably about 12, the middle pickup is very punchy and is about 8, and the bridge pickup is about 7.4 I think. I actually don't remember.
A single coil guitar pickup is essentially a magnet with wire wrapped around it (in all actuality there's very little more to it than that). Hotness refers to the number of times the wire is wrapped around the magnet, so a pickup with more wraps of wire is referred to as being hotter. A hotter pickup has more output and responds better to midrange frequencies, but generally doesn't have as much treble and bass response.
A humbucker is essentially two single coils of opposite magnetic polarity (there are minor construction differences, but that's the basic idea), which cancels out (or bucks) a lot of the the hum you get from pedals and high gain amps and stuff. So humbuckers are not necessarily hotter, because you could've used two very lightly wound coils to construct it. While this may sound like it yields nothing but benefits, humbuckers have a very different tonal character to them, not necessarily better or worse (that's all personal preference), just different. This is why some people prefer single coils even though they are noisier.
Also, hotness refers to each individual individual pickup, not the guitar as a whole (because it is possible to have a very hot pickup in the bridge position, and a pretty cool pickup in the neck position). Therefore, the number of pickups in a guitar doesn't affect the hotness of any of the pickups.
Pardon me for any minor errors I might have made in terminology (there were a couple of spots where I wasn't quite sure I was using the right words, and I didn't feel like looking it up), but I believe this post explains the general concept pretty accurately.
