I've had this guitar for almost 1 1/2 years, and is my first electric guitar. I've never been really satisfied with the sound, so I've gone about making the adjustments to truss rod, pup height, intonation, tuning and string height. I also switched out the nut to graphite impregnated one. While the nut change helped eliminate open string noise, I still have poor sustain on high E and B strings, using Ernie Ball super slinky strings.

Went to GC today and played around with American and Mexican strats. They sounded soooo much better, but of course, at $800 and $400, they should sound better than my entry level Jackson. (I played them through a frontman 25r amp, like the amp I have at home).

So, while I probably will put together a "partcaster" over time, I'd like to improve the sound coming from my Jackson. It seems that with the adjustments I've made, perhaps a way to improve the sound is via better pups. While I don't know the details on the neck and middle position single pickups, the humbucker is a Jackson® JE10 Humbucking Pickup. The neck and middle pups sound exactly the same to me, while the humbucker has a fuller sound to it (could definitely discern different sounds with the strats). The sustain issue exists for all the pups though.

The kind of music I play is basic 60's - 80's rock 'n roll and some blues.

So, what would you recommend, short of taking the guitar to a luthier?
Thanks in advance

It turns out that my digitech rp255 is affecting, negatively, on the sustain of the b and high e strings. It seems to happen for most of the modeled capabilities. I confirmed this by running the guitar output directly to my amp. Go figure!