Question on using an Axe FX III with passive pickups

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motorhead9999

Member
I own a Chapman stick that is a stereo instrument with passive pickups. I've been told that for passive pickups, it's best to have inputs with variable impedence. As far as I've understood, the Axe only has one input with variable impedance, which then leaves me with one input without that.

What are my options, or how best to setup my instrument/patches? I still don't own an Axe, so it's not something I can try out, but trying to plan for future purposes.
 
motorhead9999 said:
I own a Chapman stick that is a stereo instrument with passive pickups. I've been told that for passive pickups, it's best to have inputs with variable impedence. As far as I've understood, the Axe only has one input with variable impedance, which then leaves me with one input without that.

What are my options, or how best to setup my instrument/patches? I still don't own an Axe, so it's not something I can try out, but trying to plan for future purposes.
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Will you have a overdrive before the amp in your presets?
My thought here is that that most pedals are 1m ohm. So this makes the whole impedance matching argument mute.
Anyone else have a thought or correction?
 
All my guitars are passive and I just go into input 1. Singlecoils, P90s, modern and vintage humbuckers, no issues.

There's a lot of power, I wouldnt sweat it.
 
Don’t sweat it. Variable impedance is for things like certain pedals that load down a passive pickup but not an active one. The way the Chapman Stick is played, that’s usually not much of an issue, and many passive guitarists don’t want to play into variable impedance anyway (which can produce a thing lovingly called “tone suck”).

Bottom line: your Stick will sound great into Output 2. In fact, it already does. :)
 
Budda said:
All my guitars are passive and I just go into input 1. Singlecoils, P90s, modern and vintage humbuckers, no issues.

There's a lot of power, I wouldnt sweat it.
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Same here, all my guitars are passive and four years of Fractal gear use with 0 issues, but plenty of great tones
 
as said above, i wouldn't worry about it at all. i use an electric with piezo outputs, and i use Input 1 for the electric, just out of habit, and input 3 for the piezo. sounds great, never an issue.

if anything, maybe the higher strings can go to Input 1 for the drive stuff (if that's how it splits out). but again, it's not really a big issue.
 
unix-guy said:
My bassist also plays Stick. His sounds great with the Axe Fx III... I think you'll be ok.
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Thanks. I'm certainly not worried about the quality of the Axe Fx sounds, more so as to whether there would be a compatibility issue, and if I'd need a preamp, or something else to go between my stick and the axe.
 
Variable input impedance is a somewhat rare bird. Most devices you plug into are going to have a fixed input impedance. What matters is that the input impedance is sufficiently high so that the relatively high output impedance of your passive pickups don't load down the input and cause signal loss and muddy tone. I've not been able to find any good specs on the output impedance of the passive stick pickups, but the normal 1M ohm input impedance of the Axe III should be plenty for the vast majority of pickups out there.
 
motorhead9999 said:
Thanks. I'm certainly not worried about the quality of the Axe Fx sounds, more so as to whether there would be a compatibility issue, and if I'd need a preamp, or something else to go between my stick and the axe.
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Nope... Just plug it in and rock on! :)
 
There shouldn't be any issues plugging in direct. No need for additional preamps. Some internal tweaking but no biggie.
 
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