The DiMarzio D Activator Neck Humbucker has been carefully designed to bring the sound and tonal characteristics of active pickups without the disadvantage of lowered dynamics and the need for a battery.
Great for heavier music like Rock, Metal and punk, the D Activator remains versatile. Incredibly harmonic rich and hot to give you that ultimate gain!
In 2006 we took a close look at the most popular active neck and bridge humbuckers to see if we could capture all of the good qualities and eliminate the disadvantages… cold sound, limited dynamics and running out of headroom when played hard. And of course, they need batteries. The D Activator™ neck and bridge model were the designed result. They 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.and they respond instantly to hard or light pick attack. The sound is powerful, clean, and open, with excellent harmonic overtones and very tight lows. The best way to describe the D Activator™ neck pickup is that it is big, bright and open sounding with surprising string-to-string balance. The bridge has an enriched harmonic quality and the notes want to sing.
Recommended For: Neck. Can also be used in bridge position
Tech Talk: There’s a big difference between a pickup that sounds bright and one that sounds thin. A thin-sounding pickup will be brittle on the highest frets and empty-sounding in the mids and lows. The D Activator™ neck model doesn’t do this – both the wound and plain strings remain tight and bright up the neck, and very well balanced. This allows the D Activator™ neck model to function well in both longer scale bolt-ons and shorter scale, set-neck guitars. It also makes for a good bridge pickup if you want a sound with a lot of snap and power. Like all passive pickups, D Activators™ require controls with a minimum value of 250Kohms. 500K is the standard all around value, and our 1Megohm tone control is best for long cable runs.