Favourite Guitar Brand? (blues, fan, quote, 1962, Guitars)

GuitarBizarre · 09-10-2008, 02:03 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mr dave

i have to make a quick comment on the EMG pickups. they might not be the 'be all end all' as some people claim but they DO provide a noticeably stronger signal when running through lots of effects as compared to regular passive pickups.

it wouldn't be something people running a multi effects unit would notice nearly as much and it still depends on the overall tone you're looking for but they're hardly bad pickups.

Actually the output levels of most active pickups aren't that high... its just that they're 'FULL ON' nearly all the time, because of their more compressed response to picking dynamics. A high output passive pickup will actually be capable of more voltage than most passives, it just won't produce that voltage the vast majority of the time.

Now the conjecture starts...my theory on why this is (and trust me, it is, I have guitars with both and have verified it on more than one occasion, and Dimarzio's website says a very similar thing on some pup descriptions) is because most players with high outut pups are either a light enough touch that they like the extra response from digging in hard, or they're playing loud all the time through MASSIVE amounts of distortion. Distortion always compresses a signal, so they're getting a compressed sound anyway. In both cases the true output of the pickup is somewhat masked, for different reasons.

(Don't believe me about compression with distortion? Record a clean guitar then throw a boat load of distortion onto it and play the same thing. Look at the waveforms. The clean will have lots of peaks and valleys, the distorted will be pretty much 'On' or 'Off', and will actually be quieter all the way through, than the clean signals peaks are.)

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