Single Pickup Lead?

[LeonD]

I'm replacing the preamp in my Ibanez BTB33. When I pull the bridge pickup up, I see seven wires (see pic below). I'm kind of new to rewiring instruments so I just want to make sure I know what I have.

I'm assuming the green wire is the positive from the pickup. Five black wires are from the bridge. It's one of those bridges where each saddle is separate so I'm assuming each needs it's own ground. The sixth black wire is screwed into the body.

A couple of questions:

1. Where is the pickup's ground? Is it somehow that sixth black wire?
2. Currently the five bridge wires are routed thru the body. Would it make more sense to combine them in the pickup cavity and only route one bridge ground wire thru the bass?
3. This bass has the cheaper Bartolini pickups. Do these have enough output to be run passively?

Thanks.

 

[Killed_by_Death]

That green wire is likely a coaxial wire where there's a wire inside covered by a jacket, then the ground sheathing, then finally the green jacket:

Link Removed

I'm not sure about the Bartolini ouput strength, but my experience with a BTB & a SRX with PFR (passive full range) pickups was that the pickups weren't really as strong of a signal & the pre-amp was amplifying the output.
There was one person on here that documented changing his SRX to passive/active & got a volume drop when switching to passive.

OTOH, my SR Premium is the same volume whether passive or active, unless I'm feeding it to a low-Impedance input.

Combining the bridge-ground wires in that pocket might make it difficult to fit the pickup back in there.

 

[LeonD]

Thx for your reply.

The wire really looks just like a single, multi strand core. I did notice what looks like a small copper strip on the bottom of the pickup. I wonder if this actually goes to the internals of the pickup. Then when screwed down, it would touch the conductive coating in the pickup cavity. There's a black wire screwed down to the bottom of the cavity and was run out with the positive.

Seems like an odd way to do it as you'd have to have the pickup lowered till it's touching the body. That said, the pickup was screwed all the way down.

 

[Killed_by_Death]

The only other thing I can "think" it might be is that the springs are connected to the other end of the pickup's coil.
Get your multimeter out & measure Ohms between the spring & the green lead.

 

[LeonD]

I decided to carefully check out the leads from the pickup again. Sure enough, you were right and I was wrong. There was a brade around an insulated core. Really small! I pulled the brade back, wired it up to a volume pot and plugged it into an amp.

It worked. And loud enough where I think I'll try it passive to start.

Thanks for your help.