To All High Gainers: Noise. Noise. Noise

I have found that my guitars with EMG 81 pickups do not work well at all with high gain sounds on the AXE FX. Any active pickups will certainly add noise. My work around, though extremely expensive has been JBE (formally Joe Barden pickups) which are extremely powerful passive pickups. I was an EMG guy for like 30 years, but once I tried JBE pickups I never looked back. No more batteries to change and super powerful.
 
Andrew Sullivan said:
I have found that my guitars with EMG 81 pickups do not work well at all with high gain sounds on the AXE FX. Any active pickups will certainly add noise. My work around, though extremely expensive has been JBE (formally Joe Barden pickups) which are extremely powerful passive pickups. I was an EMG guy for like 30 years, but once I tried JBE pickups I never looked back. No more batteries to change and super powerful.
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Your active pickups should be - if anything - less noisy. They don't use mains power so they shouldn't be introducing any hum, and their low-wind-plus-preamp design means they tend to put through less interference than passive pickups.

If you're happier passive then more power to you, but something was wrong if your noisiest pickups were actives - that's the one thing that actives objectively excel at.
 
Actually you are not entirely correct. An active pickup involves a gain stage which amplifies any interference nearby and also creates gain noise as hiss which is further amplified when using a high gain patch. This would not be noticeable at lower gain settings, but the original thread here was about high gain patches.
 
Andrew Sullivan said:
Actually you are not entirely correct. An active pickup involves a gain stage which amplifies any interference nearby and also creates gain noise as hiss which is further amplified when using a high gain patch. This would not be noticeable at lower gain settings, but the original thread here was about high gain patches.
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There's a reason actives are overwhelmingly common in high gain (beyond the tone). The preamp allows a lower noise pickup, caeteris paribus.

Actives will always be quieter than passive, because they're "weaker" in the area that actually picks up the noise, such that the boost from the preamp doesn't amplify the noise much.

I believe they also use filters in the preamp to further reduce the noise and interference relative to the signal being boosted.
 
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