Friday, December 16, 2011

Ibanez: Halberd (Part 2)

This is the default electronics in Ibanez's Halberd model; the wires belong to the guitar's CAP-LZ pickups, the active relay system & batteries. It's rather cramped, no room for even a small snake to slither through.

Default batteries- China's Golden Power brand.

These are the CAP-LZ pickups up close. I find them accceptable tone-wise, not as inviting as an EMG but equally menacing. I have the same set of pickups in the Glaive so doing away with them here wasn't a loss.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

hey sub i just realised the batt compartment is together with the wiring, not a compartment on its own lol

subversion.sg said...

Yes, bro. That's one way of doing it, other guitars with active pickups tend to have a dedicated cavity for the battery. The battery housing in the Halberd was screwed into the cavity base.

Ijau D. Koceng said...

i guess it wasn't meant to be installed with active LoZ in the 1st place, unlike ART/RGA series which have it's own AA battery compartment

subversion.sg said...

i see this as a flexible implementation; you want active circuitry- there's room for it, if you wish otherwise, there is no extra feature to bother you. it's like what ESP did to their (selected) Eclipse models.

Anonymous said...

ah ic...but do those AA batteries last as long as the 9V batteries in their respective pickup slots?

subversion.sg said...

I didn't manage to let any batteries powering any active Ibanez pickups run its full life, but the ones in my RGA did last some months :-) I am actually more concerned with the tonal performance, 3v for the Ibanez vs 9v for an EMG/ Duncan- what do you think? He he...

Anonymous said...

hmmm i tried the LoZ pickups once but i've nvr tried either the emgs or the SDs (tried the duncan designed actives though and i think they're similar in tenacity to the LoZ but i cant trust my comparison cos i tested them months apart and on small amps with super low volumes lol)