application 9-volt active humbucker for aggressive playing styles. Recommended for old school metal, garage, punk, thrash, drop tunings, and other heavy rock styles. description Before designing Blackouts, we did a little market research. We found that while lots of guitarists love active pickups, many wanted a tone that was more organic, less sterile, less compressed, and with a more extended frequency response. In our efforts to solve those issues we designed Blackouts to use balanced inputs going into a differential preamp. With balanced inputs, not only are Blackouts up to 14dB quieter than the competition, but they also have more lows, more highs, less scooped mids, less compression and a more organic feel. Simply put, the Blackouts have more tone than other active pickups. The bridge pickup uses a ceramic magnet for power and dynamics and the neck pickup uses an alnico magnet for a smooth breakup. If you like the advantages of active pickups, but you really care about your tone, you'll love Blackouts.