converting active to passive

[perkinni]

i have an old active venson bass and i wanted to rewire the pickups to remove the battery so they are passive (the two pickups in there at the moment are some sort of cheap humbucker), is the output drop going to be so significant that its best that i don't, or is this not possible fullstop?

Also is there a way to rewire passive pickups to increase the output?

 

[line6man]

If the pickups are active, they cannot be made passive. If you have passive pickups with a preamp, on the other hand, you could remove the preamp if you want.

What it would sound like passive is anyone's guess. Some preamps are transparent, others are voiced to color the sound. As far as output goes, that also depends on the preamp you are removing. Some preamps provide a gain boost, others are unity gain.

The only way to get more output from a pickup is to rewind it with more wire, or change the magnets. Both of which change the tone significantly.

 

[bassbenj]

i have an old active venson bass and i wanted to rewire the pickups to remove the battery so they are passive (the two pickups in there at the moment are some sort of cheap humbucker), is the output drop going to be so significant that its best that i don't, or is this not possible fullstop?

Also is there a way to rewire passive pickups to increase the output?

The easiest way to test this all out is to rewire the pickups directly to the output jack just as a temporary test. You can do this with just the neck pickup just to see how much output your pickups alone have. It will give you a bit more output if you wire the coils of your humbucker in series. In other words the ground wire of the second coil is hooked to the "hot" wire of the first coil. And the "hot" wire of the second coil goes to you output jack. (Be sure to remove the output wire from the old preamp from the jack before wiring up this passive test.) If your humbucker doesn't have separate wires for the coils, don't worry about it and just wire the single output wire to the jack.

If this temporary hook up seems to give you enough output to work with, then you can dig in and rewire the bass passive according one of the standard wiring diagrams. But if the output seems really low and weak, (remember you've got no volume control wired in so this is a loud as it gets!) then those pickups won't work without a preamp with some gain.

So see what you've got!