active & passive in same guitar? Is it possible

[King Nothing]

My rg570 still has the stock pickups on it. They've never been very good. I want to put an EMG in the bridge. Will I still be able to use my neck and single coil? I'm probably going to replace the neck at a later date with a sustainer/sustaniac. Will this combo work? thanks
-Chris

[rty13ibz98]

the answer is yes, but to make the output match you will need the emg pa-2 fixed preamp for the passives.


rich

[King Nothing]

whats the difference in the PA2 and the Afterburner. It looks like they both have almost identical descriptions.

[TonyT1000]

The Afterburner has a knob so it is adjustable. the PA2 is a preset boost with a switch. You have to go inside the guitar and adjust a trim-pot to set a different boost amount.

[King Nothing]

So I'd probably put the EMG in with a PA2. But now I'm confused about the sustainiac. On their site, it says somethin like you can't get the Stealth Plus on an Ibanez if you want to use the 5-way switch. You have to get a Stealth and a mini humbucker and their superswitch to have the 5-way. I don't understand why all this is. What would happen if i got the stealth plus? Would it just keep the single coil from working? This is confusing the hell out of me!

[buddroyce]

Yes you can and you don't need an active preamp for your passives. You just need some fancy wiring. I've never done it with an HSH guitar but I have put an EMG707 with a Stock passive 7 string neck humbucker. All it is was was ditching the tone pot and having two volume pots, one 25k for the EMG and one 500k for the passive neck pickup. Then out to a 3-way switch which went straight to the output jack.

I haven't tried mixing an EMG with passives using an After Burner or PA2, but that would probably affect more the output level than the impedence for the pickups. You probably could put a dummy load to drastically cut a 500k pot down to 25k so the EMG would sound right but you gotta figure out the right combo of resistors. (I knew I should have copied down the wiring for that ESP Sugizo model when I had it)

[TonyT1000]

From the EMG Site:

http://www.emgpickups.com/support.asp

Can I mix EMG's with passive pickups?

It is possible to mix EMG's with passive pickups. There are three possible wiring configurations; one is better than the other two.

Use the high impedance (250K-500K) volume and tone controls. The problem is that the high impedance controls act more like a switch to the EMG's. The passive pickups, however, will work fine. If you have a guitar with two pickups and two volume pots, with a three-way switch, there is another alternative. Use the 25K pots for the EMG, and the 250K pots for the passive pickup. This way you can use one or the other with no adverse affects, but with the switch in the middle position the passive pickup will have reduced gain and response.

Use the low-impedance (25K) volume and tone controls provided with the EMG's. The problem here is that the passive pickups will suffer a reduction in gain and loss of high-frequency response.

This is the best alternative. Install an EMG-PA-2 on the passive pickups. There are two benefits to doing this. With the trimpot on the PA-2, you can adjust the gain of the passive pickups to match the EMG's. The PA-2 acts as an impedance matching device so you can use the low-impedance EMG controls (25K) without affecting the tone of the passive pickups. You will also be able to use other EMG accessory circuits such as the SPC, RPC, EXB, EXG, etc. For this application, we recommend ordering the PA-2 without the switch for easy installation on the inside of a guitar.

[King Nothing]

thats funny, I looked all over EMGs faq yesterday and somehow missed that!
Thanks for finding that for me

Now I gotta figure out the whole sustainiac thing

[buddroyce]

That PA-2 part s new news for me. My old EMG rep never even told me that the PA2 fixes the impedance problem.