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Post by merseymale on Jul 1, 2014 9:32:20 GMT -5
Hiya! My 1st post & I FEEL like a newbie too! Can anyone tell if my Active PUPs are even workin'? What should i expect from actives? Is there a volume boost? there might be a problem... Not sure if it's with the PickUps or me, though!! I got the chance to swap some old passive pickups for a set of active Pickups, recently. I always have a pair of Guitars I like to tinker with & I've never seemed inspired by guitarists who use Actives so never felt the urge to explore em till now. I got three little used active strat styles-epoxied with the regular braided earth wrapped round a red (in the case of 2of the PUPs & white in the 3rd) 'hot' wire plus an extra single red wire(9volt+?) There was no wiring diagram so to test em I placed them on an old watch; connected the braided wire to the earth of an amp & it's associated red wire to the 'hot' of the amps input too. STRAIGHT AWAY I could hear the ticking coming through the amp's speaker- just as if it was a regular passive SingleCoil! Once I connected the remaining red wire to the positive(+) terminal of a 9volt battery & then connected the negative(-) to the braided wire from the pickup nothing much happened... Just the same ticking as before with no increase in volume Any thoughts...?
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Post by haydukej on Jul 1, 2014 13:08:23 GMT -5
Hi Mersey, Welcome. If you hear a nice sterile sound coming through the amp, then your actives are working Sorry, couldn't resist, it feels like Friday already. Is this ticking without hitting the strings? Also, what passives are you using that cause ticking sounds? Most of the time people will complain of a hum, if anything, with single coils. Is this sounds present with all your guitars? The different color of the third pickup I would imagine is a clever way to identify the bridge (maybe?) pickup. Here's basic 3 active single coil wiring diagram from Mr. Duncan. Is your wiring close to this? Assuming you're using the strat set up of 1 volume, 2 tones, and a standard 5-way switch.
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Post by newey on Jul 1, 2014 17:22:47 GMT -5
Haydukej said:
More likely it's to ID the middle pickup, which will ordinarily be reverse-wound, reverse-polarity (RWRP) from the other two pickups. In sets where all three pickups are wound differently, there are usually 3 different colors used.
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edvard
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Post by edvard on Jul 1, 2014 21:07:14 GMT -5
Sounds like the pickups are working just fine; nice trick using a watch to generate a bit of electromagnetic heartbeat. Some active electronics offer a bit of a volume boost, but not all do (search for a user manual if you know the brand name), and usually it's pretty obvious. The best thing active pickups are good at is, maintaining the tone of the pickups no matter what you're plugged into. Pickups are a high output impedance device, so when not plugged into an optimal input (like most guitar amps), the tone will suffer. Plugging your guitar into a really long cable run, your computer sound card, some effects pedals (especially older fuzz pedals & wahs), and some setups running effects in parallel, will suck your tone dry unless you have a buffer. THAT is what your active electronics are for. What you should notice is a slightly brighter and full-bodied sound from whatever you're plugged into, and more usable tones from all settings of your guitar's volume and tone control. Hope that helps!
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Post by merseymale on Jul 2, 2014 6:20:39 GMT -5
Thanks for the replies guys! So I'm taking it that the ticking (from the watch BTW) that's coming through the amp's speaker is NOT supposed to get louder & that the braided wire SHOULD go to the battery's Neg terminal? Am I right..?
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Post by Deleted on Jul 2, 2014 7:02:21 GMT -5
Haydukej said: More likely it's to ID the middle pickup, which will ordinarily be reverse-wound, reverse-polarity (RWRP) from the other two pickups. In sets where all three pickups are wound differently, there are usually 3 different colors used. i think most of active singles are noiseless so why the need for the mid pup to be RWRP in relation to the others?
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Post by Deleted on Jul 2, 2014 7:07:07 GMT -5
Sounds like the pickups are working just fine; nice trick using a watch to generate a bit of electromagnetic heartbeat. Some active electronics offer a bit of a volume boost, but not all do (search for a user manual if you know the brand name), and usually it's pretty obvious. The best thing active pickups are good at is, maintaining the tone of the pickups no matter what you're plugged into. Pickups are a high output impedance device, so when not plugged into an optimal input (like most guitar amps), the tone will suffer. Plugging your guitar into a really long cable run, your computer sound card, some effects pedals (especially older fuzz pedals & wahs), and some setups running effects in parallel, will suck your tone dry unless you have a buffer. THAT is what your active electronics are for. What you should notice is a slightly brighter and full-bodied sound from whatever you're plugged into, and more usable tones from all settings of your guitar's volume and tone control. Hope that helps! Nice explanation. I just would like to add my experience here. I have two guitars with actives. A kramer with Seymour Duncan live wires metal (late 80s) and an Ibanez with EMG 81/60. The Duncan LWHM are pretty different animals compared to the EMGs. EMGs with no battery will produce a very weak sound that will make even heavily clipped distortion to sound like the clean channel. Seymour Duncans without battery produce no sound at all! So for me, simply my actives do not work without battery.
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edvard
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Post by edvard on Jul 2, 2014 20:04:09 GMT -5
Because not all active singles are noiseless. It's a nice feature, but not something that can easily be done with electronics alone. Otherwise, we'd be seeing humbucker pedals come standard with all single-coil guitars Good point, can't believe I totally missed that. Yes, you should have no sound or very little when hooking up without a battery, even if the electronics were broken. An active pickup will have the pickup completely insulated from the rest of the world by the electronics. I'd have to see the actual wiring harness to see what's going on there. Many active pickups do offer a boost, but not all. So it's not a clear indication one way or the other that they don't get louder. Generally, the braided wire is OK to connect to ground, which will very often be the 9V ground as well. So, unless your actives are some novel system that isolates the power supply as well, then yes. Merseymale, do you have a picture or a drawing of the wiring? Maybe there's something that should be there besides just those three wires. Do you have a brand or model number to look up? I'm getting a growing feeling there's something missing here...
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Post by merseymale on Jul 3, 2014 21:52:23 GMT -5
Hi! They are ARTEC Strat sized (think they may be called LEADERS?) Anyone familiar with 'em..?
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edvard
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Post by edvard on Jul 4, 2014 3:58:56 GMT -5
Hmmm... from what you are describing, the wiring is shown on page 4 of the Artec wiring book -> artecsound.com/wiring/wiring_book01.pdfLooks like you're doing it right... The "Leader" line of pickups I don't see any specs for them being active -> artecsound.com/pickups/f-pickups/pickup06.htmA little searching around the internet calls them "Artec Leader Power 20 active" and they are dual-coil internally (tricksy...) so you should hear lower noise from it by default. Still can't find any details on wiring besides that wiring book. Maybe email the company? -> artecsound.com/contact/index.html
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Post by newey on Jul 4, 2014 7:42:55 GMT -5
Hmmm. Odd that the Artec diagram doesn't show one of the actives to have a white "hot" connection. As GD surmised, all three are the same on the Artec diagram.
But merseymale seems to have active pickups, since they do have the 3rd wire for the battery power as he describes them.
But I also note that Artec's drawings are a bit gefooey when it comes to wire colors. On the diagram showing their passive single coils, it shows three different colors on the diagram, but the neck and bridge SCs are actually identical if you read the written description of the colors instead of looking at the colors themselves. One wire shown as being red is labelled "white".
So, still a mystery as to why one pickup is different!
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Post by merseymale on Jul 19, 2014 20:15:03 GMT -5
I got 2 others in black, recently, but they both had white sleeves on the Hot wire...
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Post by Deleted on Jul 20, 2014 10:03:28 GMT -5
dont fight with artec if you are a noob. Go for some EMGs/Duncans instead. Livewires are perfect. A lot of people love SA/S EMGs as well. 100 bucks for a lifetime is not big deal.
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