Alembic Activator Pickups help

You seem to love Alembic Pickups boddy !

For your questions , I would get in touch with Mica at Alembic s , she s well placed to answer you on this matter

 

Also ; their is some nice Filter Based Preamps , from ACG , here s the link , can be a good alternative to the pricy Alembic Filter-based Pre : AC Guitars shop

 

nothing better than alembic pres and pups. hands down the best out there

 

The pickups themselves are not active. They are passive low output pickups. The ones I have examined where about 8K, but because they are stacks they are low output.

So you need a preamp with some gain to boost them up. You want to use 250k or 500k controls if you are putting the controls before the preamp.

You can use a simple JFET booster to get the pickups up to normal level. The you can use any preamp you like. If the preamp has adjustable gain, than that's probably all you need.

 

I've seen some use ACG pre's with Alembic pickups and be happy with that setup.

There are quite a few people very familiar with the technical aspects of these pickups/pre's over at the alembic forum. I'd suggest you pop in there and ask a question or two. You're likely to get a few very knowledgeable people giving you just the info you need and more likely than not, Mica (from Alembic) will likely chime in as well.

 

I just told the technical aspects of these pickups. I'm very familiar with their inner workings. They are stacked passive humbuckers with a ceramic magnet in the top coil. The bottom coil only contains a plastic spacer instead of the magnet.

I've made preamps for them too. By all means inquire over at the forum, but you only need an inexpensive JFET booster to use these and not an $800 Activator preamp (which has about $8 worth of parts in it).

 

The pickups are low impedance, so they are full range and nice and clean sounding. The Alembic Activator preamp has a low pass filter as a tone control. The newer Activators have bass/treble controls. I have made simple buffer preamps for these pickups and they sound great.

So I'd say it's mostly the pickups. There isn't much to the preamps.

 

Fair enough- I wasn't trying to imply your information was incorrect, so no need to feel insulted. Was just providing the OP with another avenue for getting advice.

If it was me, I'd feel most comfortable getting technical advice from the people who designed the pickups/pre's, etc. Again, not a slight to you, nor am I implying that you're wrong, but there is a fair amount of bad advice handed out on internet forums on a daily basis- mostly by people who swear they know what they're talking about. I dropped the link just in case the OP wasn't aware that there was a good avenue for technical advice from Alembic.

 

Yes, the Alembic forum is a great place. But Mica would likely try and sell him a preamp. I'm a big Alembic fan, but honestly, their electronics are over priced for what they consist of. There's not a whole lot to the Activator preamp. I have one here. It's about the same quality as EMG preamps at 10 times the cost.

 

I can concur with David at SGD, I have several axes with Alembic pickups of all sorts -AXYs, MXYs, Fatboys, Activator Ps & Js. I use Alembic Filters and I also use my own preamps, which are JFET preamps with about 20dB gain. I have built several versions, and spec'ed one to filter off the hi end at about 10K. Alembic filter preamps filter off around 6K IIRC. I love Alembic, but the hyped prices around several things like the preamps - no. The parts are not expensive and neither are they particularly exotic nor the circuit esoteric.

 

Yes, the filter's center frequency range is 350Hz to 6kHz, 12dB/octave.

 

This might help you , but have the knowledge to explain it to you

Designing JFET Audio PreAmplifiers

 

A JFET is a junction field effect transistor. Also known as a FET. FETs have high input impedances and make good buffers. Some of the bass preamps on the market labeled as "discreet" use JFETs. Discreet means they dotn't use op amps, which are a collections of circuits and transistors in one package.

A very simple and great sounding JFET booster is the original Alembic Stratobaster. It uses just a hand full of parts.

You can find the schematic on the internet, and also you can buy the circuit board here:

http://www.generalguitargadgets.com...age=shop.flypage&product_id=43&category_id=14

They have a whole kit, but it's for a floor stomp box. You can build it using the MPF102 FETs sold at RadioShack.

This thing can drive a power amp at full gain, and is very quiet and clean sounding. I used to use a similar circuit for my low impedance pickups, and have build them for people to use Alembic pickups. One change I would make is to change the output cap to 10µF for better low end response.

 

Are they Filter-Based too , (jfet) don t know about jfet or whatever , might seem as a rookkie question to some but if you don t ask , you don t know right ! lol . Thanx & have a nice one .

 

Forget it , just saw David s post in there

 

No, they just take the sound and buffer it and makes it louder if you want. I used to put them in all my basses back in the 80s. It tightened up the tone and made them sound better.