The Steel Guitar Forum

Active pickups (ie pickups with their own battery power and tone shaping) are widely available for electric guitar and bass. Are they fitted or available for Pedal Steels ?

For steel guitar, you buy the buffer amp separately from the pickup. Goodrich and others make them.
You can't put the amp inside the guitar as you would with a Stratocaster, but you use as short a cale as possible between pickup and amp, to minimize high frequency loss by "loading" the pickup. The Goodrich can be mounted on the leg of the steel guitar, and requires a few cm of cable. Others plug directly into the output of the guitar.

I had an active pickup on a Sho~Bud LDG.
It was an EMG and it sounded GREAT. There's a lot of room under that sucker for a battery. I traded that guitar off to Bobby Seymour. Check with him. I don't know if he sold the guitar with that pickup in it or not. He might have it lying around somewhere.
Erv

Hilton and Goodrich both make active volume pedals that have a power supply and attach with short chords to the pickup jack and preamp the signal the same as the Matchbox type devices Earnest referred to. Also, Brad Sarno has a "Black Box" that does this and supposedly adds tube-like warmth to the tone.

Dave:
Have you used the Black Box ? I have, and I believe you can remove the " supposedly " from your description. I have not used the Goodrich, so I can't comment on that.Of course this is just my opinion, after fifty six years of trying to play this instrument.

Old Bud

<FONT SIZE=1 COLOR="#8e236b"><p align=CENTER>[This message was edited by Willis Vanderberg on 13 August 2004 at 05:57 PM.]</p></FONT>

If you use a pot pedal, and aren't ready to invest in one of Brad's Black Boxes, the Goodrich Matchbox is much cheaper, and still well worth having. However, the Black Box just sounds way, way better, especially if you are using a solid state amplifier. They both restore high frequencies that are otherwise lost in the pedal (and cable?), but the Matchbox does it in a somewhat flat, dimensionless way compared to the Black Box. The Black Box adds, or brings out, depth and sparkle that you just didn't know your guitar could produce. You pretty much get what you pay for.... Look at some of the other threads about this.