About 6 weeks ago on a whim I bought a guitar that seemed too good to be true. $360, great neck, fretwork that is worthy of a guitar 3x the price, and just about perfect setup out of the box. All I needed to do was polish the frets, and it plays about as nice as my $1K Charvel.
The pickups were the only thing that I sorta didn’t like. They aren’t bad per se, but they are a bit low output, and the pickup switch/tone and volume pots feel cheap.
note: they work fine, and if I didn’t have my Charvel to compare it to, I would likely have not noticed any issues with the pickups or sound.
I got a spot bonus at work, and I used it to order up a set of EMG Active pickups1. I do like the EMG’s and have used them a few times in the past. They just juice the output and give the signal a bit of oomph that run of the mill passive pickups.
What I am getting at is that they are here, still in their packaging, and I am not sure I am going to install them.
Yesterday, I was dodging some work, and I fired up the Helix, dialed up the Revv Generator Purple amp sim, dropped a little slap back delay on it, and I just let it rip, for about 45 minutes.
Frankly, to my ears, it sounded great. I do not need to upgrade the pickups. I will keep the set until at some point in the future I have a dual humbucker that needs new pickups.
But for now, I will leave it as it is, and play until my fingers bleed.
A guitar pickup is essentially an electromagnet in reverse. Strands of copper wire are wrapped around either a bar or individual pole magnets, and the vibration of the strings produces a small electric current. The number of winds, the proximity to the strings, and the strength of the electric field all combine to generate a signal that you then feed into an amplifier. That is a passive system. The characteristic is that the voltage signal is very small. Active pickups place an OpAmp on the pickup, and this provides boost to the signal before it hits the tone pot, and then out to the amplifier. These circuits can be tuned and balanced to give different ‘color’.