Re: Truth And Lies About Installing Emgs..
Lets take the mystery out of this.
Active pickups are very simular to passive pickups and active pickups have all the same components that passive pickups have. Bobbins, magnets, coils and connecting wires are all in there. The big difference is that active pickups have a built in preamp that can be used to increase output past what you can get with a passive pickup and the preamp can be used to shape tone by the manufacturer. If you want more bottom end, you just tweak the preamp.
The preamp also allows for lower impedance. Since the coils don't have to be as big to generate the signal, they are less prone to pickup RF and EMF interference. Just like a radio, the bigger the antenna is the more stuff you cna pull out of the air. The lower impedance of active pickups is the reason you need different pots with active pickups and generally 25k to 100k is the required pot value.
The TRS output jack serves two purposes. The tip is your signal path and the sleeve is the connection to ground from your amp, just like with passive pickups. The ring is used as an on/off "switch" for your battery. When you plug in your guitar cable which is mono (tip-sleeve) the ring and sleeve on your TRS jack are connected which completes the batteries ground path and adds the battery into the circuit. When you unplug the cord, the battery is in effect "turned off" and this saves battery life without adding a seperate on-off switch to your guitar.
Since the ring is a ground connection you want to connect the black wire from the battery connector to the ring terminal and the red wire to the active pickups battery lead. With two batteries you will connect the first black to the ring terminal and then connect the red from the first battery jack to the black of the second jack. The colors will be black-red-black-red from the jack to the pickup.
Those are the only real differences. The switch wiring, volume pot and tone pot connections will look exactly like a passive wiring. If you don't have a cap between the volume and tone pot or from the #1 tone pot terminal to ground your tone pot will not work.
There is no mystery to active pickup wiring, you are just adding a battery and a switch. the pot values are different but they wire the same as passive.