Seymour Duncan

The genre-defining crunch and wail of modern, heavy rock guitar often comes from active guitar pickups, which have a built-in, battery-powered preamp epoxy-sealed into a stark black casing. It's a distinctly modern sound married to a patently modern look. Now, for the first time, you can make any pickup an active pickup, even pickups with a more traditional look.

Seymour Duncan has taken its award-winning, low-noise, Blackouts balanced differential preamp out of the pickup and integrated it with a high-quality volume pot. Blackouts Modular Preamp is an ingenious way to get that high-gain, active guitar sound with any passive, four-conductor pickup. Simply by swapping a volume pot for a Blackouts Modular Preamp volume pot, you can get active pickup performance with a more classic look.

To capture the precise tone and performance of Original Blackouts pickups, Seymour Duncan created the specially voiced Blackouts Coil Pack, a replacement humbucker designed specifically for use with the Blackouts Modular Preamp. The Coil Pack will be available as a stand-alone neck or bridge humbucker, or in a two-humbucker set packaged together with the Blackouts Modular Preamp.

Connecting the Coil Pack or any pickup to Blackouts Modular Preamp is an incredibly simple, solderless procedure, thanks to the same, bare-wire Lockdown connector stations used in the Seymour Duncan Liberator Solderless Pickup Change System. Installing pickups only requires a mini-screwdriver to secure pickup and battery leads into the rock-solid, screw-clamp connectors.