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Fade to Blackouts with a modular preamp

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bcdon

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Man, I love my Seymour Duncan Blackouts but installing them took some work (and 1.5 litres of wine!). ;-) How about converting your passive pups to Blackouts by simply swapping the Volume pot? How cool is that!?

http://www.seymourduncan.com/blackouts/
Just swap your volume pot with a Blackouts™ Modular Preamp. It combines the high-output, low-noise Blackouts™ preamp with a quality volume pot and our Liberator Solderless Pickup Change System for quick connections. Get your own sound—with your own look.

The genre-defining crunch and wail of modern heavy rock guitar often comes from active guitar pickups, which have a built-in, battery-powered preamp epoxy-sealed into a stark black casing. It's a distinctly modern sound married to a patently modern look. Now, for the first time, you can make any pickup an active pickup, even pickups with a more traditional look.

Seymour Duncan has taken its award-winning, low-noise Blackouts™ balanced differential preamp out of the pickup and integrated it with a high-quality volume pot. Blackouts™ Modular Preamp is an ingenious way to get that high-gain, active guitar sound with any passive four-conductor pickup. Simply by swapping a volume pot for a Blackouts Modular Preamp volume pot, you can get active pickup performance with a more classic look.

To capture the precise tone and performance of Original Blackouts™ pickups, Seymour Duncan created the specially voiced Blackouts™ Coil Pack, a replacement humbucker designed specifically for use with the Blackouts Modular Preamp. The Coil Pack will be available as a stand-alone neck or bridge humbucker or in a two-humbucker set packaged together with the Blackouts Modular Preamp.

Connecting the Coil Pack or any pickup to Blackouts Modular Preamp is an incredibly simple, solderless procedure, thanks to the same bare-wire Lockdown connector stations used in the Seymour Duncan Liberator™ Solderless Pickup Change System. Installing pickups only requires a mini-screwdriver to secure pickup and battery leads into the rock-solid screw-clamp connectors.
 
That sounds much like the EMG PA-2 onboard preamp...I had that on my Les Paul for over a decade. Zero to 20dB of clean boost...I really really liked it, although I always had it on just a few dB...still, it was just perfect to kick any toob amph to life without pedals. Also had one later on my Explorer. But, after that I've used EMG's since I've built my own guitars basically anyhow. If I ever get a brain fart and buy a Gibson or some other high-priced 'collectible' guitar I don't want to modify to preserve the value, I'll probably try this Seymour system, or then the PA-2. Beats the hell out of always having to have a clean boost pedal before the amph, and I never ever want a totally clean sound.
 
It seems you can do the same with EMG Afterburner. :whatever:
 
Robert said:
Hey, go easy on that wine when you're holding a solder iron... :eek:

Well, it was over the course of two nights... Thinking about it, I'd probably have had it installed in one night if I skipped the wine. ;-)
 
kiteman said:
It seems you can do the same with EMG Afterburner. :whatever:

Never heard of the EMG Afterburner until now. So I guess there really is nothing new under the sun after all. Oh well, I think it's cool. :dude
 
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