The D Activator™ bridge has an enriched harmonic quality and the notes want to sing. Both the D Activator™ neck and bridge pickups were designed to eliminate the sterile edginess commonly associated with active pickups. The D Activators™ use coils tuned to different frequencies. The idea is to shift the resonant point of the pickup to the frequencies of the harmonics that you want to accentuate from the guitar.The D Activator™ bridge pickup is about 25% louder than the D Activator™ neck. Since DiMarzio were developing both pickups from the ground up as a set, they adjusted the volume levels on the pickups so they are balanced. That way when you switch from the neck to the bridge, you don't hear a drop in volume, another common problem with active pickups.
Recommended For: Bridge, Neck
Tech Talk: An interesting fact about the most popular active bridge pickups is that they aren't incredibly loud. Instead, they have a strong, focused attack that hits the amp very hard and makes them 'feel' more powerful than they actually spec out to be. This is an important characteristic that they needed to capture with the D Activator™ bridge pickup. They also wanted to avoid the limiting effect that can occur with active pickups when they are played hard. DiMarzio's pickup is passive with a lot of headroom, and it responds quickly and accurately to changes in pick attack. A hard pick attack doesn't cause the signal to flatten out, and picking more softly or rolling the volume control down lets the sound clean up naturally. Like all passive pickups, D Activators™ require controls with a minimum value of 250Kohms. 500K is the standard all around value, and DiMarzio's 1Megohm tone control is best for long cable runs.
Technical Info
Wiring: 4 conductor
It's supposed to be designed to rival Active Pickups, except they are somewhat noisier, of course.
They just came out with them this year.
As far as DiMarzio pickups, I always like the Breed, Evo and Evolution.
DiMarzio are offering a new color this year: Camo
Looks like a pickup ready for battle.
If it was in Desert Camo that would be alot cooler.
I'd build a Lynch Style Kamikazee for ya Ken.
I also found a pic of that Skull and Crossbones guitar:
I'm not a good enough wood whittler to attempt that stuff.
Oh man that carved skulls and bones makes me wanna crank up some Dokken & bust through walls while jammin out!!! Someday I hope to own some of those Lynch replicas and the DeMartini crossed swords. Paul at Big Head does killer paint work on those bengal/tiger stripe models as well as the crossed swords, well pretty much everything Paul has painted has kicked ass. Gotta win that Powerball tomorrow!!!
I agree with you Ken, Paul does some totally amazing work. I've never seen them in person, but everything he has on his web site is the shit. I would love to do that stuff full time. I'd be in my glory that's for sure.
I like the DeMartini Crossed Sword guitar also. I also like Lynch's Bengal guitars. I almost made the Green Booger Bengal, but the body was top routed and I didn't feel like filling in the holes.
Another one I considered was a Jake E. Lee Charvel, the White one. But my body wasn't a hard tail like Jake's.
Oh yeah, forgot about the Jake E Lee models. Yep got to have a few of those as well. The white one is my favorite too. Check out GMW guitars. Lee Garver used to build some killer Jake models. He had all the DeMartini models as well until Fender bought Jackson/Charvel and forced him to quit building them (at least that's what I read). Lee also does killer paint work. His archives on the site are amazing.
The only thing that I didn't like about the Jake E. Lee guitars made by ESP was that they were a short 24 3/4 scale, which is what Jake liked. His White guitar was actually a 1975 Hard Tail Strat that was converted to a 'Charvel' by a close friend of his who was working at Charvel at the time.
He used a Seymour Duncan JB pickup and 2 DiMarzio DP111 aka SDS-1, which were slanted rearward like the bridge pup on a Strat.
Here's the Purple Charvel
Here's a 2005 ESP Jake E. Lee Signature
