Combining Passive & Active

[Murray]

Just recently purchased a guitar factory fitted with two active humbuckers. My quick question: is it possible to replace one of the pickups with a passive model or would this cause all sorts of 'electronic type' problems?
Cheers for any advice.
Murray

 

[some_dude]

Re: Combining Passive & Active

Yes, it is possible.

No, it isn't recommended.

 

[Artie]

Re: Combining Passive & Active

Hi Murray; Welcome to the forum. Yes, there are problems with mixing passives and actives, but they can be easily resolved by adding the necessary components - which, of course, costs money.

Generally, you'll need some sort of active pre-amp, or mixer, such as D-Tar's Eclipse:

D-Tar Eclipse

BTW - The "D" in D-Tar is Seymour Duncan. The Eclipse was specifically designed to mix active/passive/peizo pickups. There are probably others too, just this is the one I know of.

Artie

 

[jeremy]

Re: Combining Passive & Active

you could mix them in the same guitar but actives want to see 25k or 50k controls and passives want to see 250k to 500k. so if you have independant controls it can work, but shared controls dont usually sound that good.

if you had seperate outputs you could use the eclipse or something similar

 

[Murray]

Re: Combining Passive & Active

Thanks for the input. I thought there would be an issue with pot values, so that's useful.
M.