Well i didnt find any other thread on this or maybe i wasnt trying hard enough but here goes.What other pickups are good besides EMGs.
LIke what kind of pickups would be needed to have tones like
Iced Earth,Death,Kataklysm,basically some sort of death metal tone or something that sounds nice like that iced earth stuff and also good clean tone.

Pickups are like non-adjustable pre-amp eqs. Go on the Seymoure Duncan site and the DiMarzio site and look at the charts.

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as far as acheiving somebody elses tone, your amp is going to have a bigger affect on that than your pickups will.
but some good high gain passive pickups are: duncan invader, duncan dimebucker, Dimarzio x2n, Dimarzio super distortion, gibson burstbucker.
i'd probably say to stick to seymoure duncan(not 'duncan designs'), gibson, and Dimarzio.

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What exactly is the difference between passive and active pickups?I heard one uses the battery,whats that mean?

SD's are what i always use in my guitars,
in my v i've got a custom in the bridge and a pearly gates in the neck, and in my ibanez i've got an invader in the bridge and a 59 in neck. Another supposedly good pickup for the bridge is the Dimebucker but i aint tryed that out yet.

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So active pickups are better but you have to put an actual battery inside your guitar?Will it fit inside where the pickups go or do i have make new space?How long does the life of the battery last?

just because a pickup is active doesnt mean its better. it's all personal taste and popular opinion.

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active pickups are shit in my opinion. I liked them at first and put emgs in my guitar. The only way i can describe the sound now that i have a tube amp is like trying to use one of those hearing machines they use to check for hearing disablities that just produce solid tone, thats how emgs sound regularly, and distorted they sound like what one of those would sound like distorted.

Do what I did:

Dimarzio Tone Zone and Steve Special!!!

GREAT tone. Period. One of the best pickups you can get.

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what emgs did you have in there? because an 81 or an 85 in the bridge shouldnt sound anything like that, an hz maybe, but those arent even active. but its probably something else causing the problem.
my other guitarist has a 81-85 set, he plugs into a tube amp, and it sounds pretty sweet.
as does the tone of the many 'pro' guitarists that use actvive pickups.

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