Ibanez RGA7 pickups help needed

[rabbitt]

Good day everyone!
After playing my ibanez rga7 since 2015 the bridge pickup broke, there's no sound at all coming from it when i switch to bridge position (both neck position and middle position are fine), so i finally decided to swap pickups since they're kinda bad.
Does anyone have any experience swapping the rga7 pickups to passive? i really want to go passive with my guitar. Would i need any kind of woodwork or special tools? do i need to buy new pots or an input jack? a pickup selector switch?
Thanks for the help in advance and i apologize for my english.

 

[c7spheres]

Good day everyone!
After playing my ibanez rga7 since 2015 the bridge pickup broke, there's no sound at all coming from it when i switch to bridge position (both neck position and middle position are fine), so i finally decided to swap pickups since they're kinda bad.
Does anyone have any experience swapping the rga7 pickups to passive? i really want to go passive with my guitar. Would i need any kind of woodwork or special tools? do i need to buy new pots or an input jack? a pickup selector switch?
Thanks for the help in advance and i apologize for my english.

I don't have experience with that specific model, but normally If you're doing a full active to passive conversion it's a good idea to replace everything in terms of pots and caps. You can probably save the output jack, maybe the selector switch, but for the minial cost I'd replace everything. Passives usually have different pot values than actives, (usually 500k for passives and 25k for actives etc. ) . Probably don't need any special tools other than the basic solder iron, screw drivers etc. Can't see why you'd need to do any woodworking stuff.

 

[couverdure]

Can't see why you'd need to do any woodworking stuff.

The RGA7 has soapbar/"7-string EMG"-style pickups instead of the usual humbucker design. That's gonna need some rerouting in the body to fit regular 7-string passive pickups in it.

If you don't want to cut some wood off, Seymour Duncan, Bare Knuckle, Lundgren, and some other boutique pickup makers that I may have forgotten the names of have passive pickups in soapbar/EMG casing. The pots have to be changed of course since passives usually need to use 500k pots instead of the 25k that came with those stock active pickups.

 

[c7spheres]

The RGA7 has soapbar/"7-string EMG"-style pickups instead of the usual humbucker design. That's gonna need some rerouting in the body to fit regular 7-string passive pickups in it.

If you don't want to cut some wood off, Seymour Duncan, Bare Knuckle, Lundgren, and some other boutique pickup makers that I may have forgotten the names of have passive pickups in soapbar/EMG casing. The pots have to be changed of course since passives usually need to use 500k pots instead of the 25k that came with those stock active pickups.

Oh yeah where they screw in, that's right.

 

[MaxOfMetal]

The RGA7 has soapbar/"7-string EMG"-style pickups instead of the usual humbucker design. That's gonna need some rerouting in the body to fit regular 7-string passive pickups in it.

If you don't want to cut some wood off, Seymour Duncan, Bare Knuckle, Lundgren, and some other boutique pickup makers that I may have forgotten the names of have passive pickups in soapbar/EMG casing. The pots have to be changed of course since passives usually need to use 500k pots instead of the 25k that came with those stock active pickups.

Or you just cut the tabs on the passives and deal with a little extra space.

Conversion covers would be an option too.

 

[fcv]

Unless something else is clearly broken, you might also want to take a quick peek at the switch as well and see if it's just dirty. I have a guitar that the neck pickup stopped working once, and when I eventually took off the cover to try to figure out what the problem was, there was a dead bug squashed between the switch contacts on the switch. A little cleaning of the switch and it worked fine again.

 

[Zoobiedood]

If you switch out active to passive, yes, you need new pots. No sound might not be the pickup, it can simply be a bad connection on the switch.

 

[rabbitt]

Unless something else is clearly broken, you might also want to take a quick peek at the switch as well and see if it's just dirty. I have a guitar that the neck pickup stopped working once, and when I eventually took off the cover to try to figure out what the problem was, there was a dead bug squashed between the switch contacts on the switch. A little cleaning of the switch and it worked fine again.

I did open the cover to check the switch but i couldn't see anything wrong with it

 

[LeviathanKiller]

You'll need new pots and a ground wire to the bridge (sometimes it's already present though like it was on my Schecter Hellraiser Hybrid PT-7).

Several manufacturers have soapbar-size passives too. It's quite ugly to stick anything but soapbar-sized ones back in. I debated doing that myself once and so I looked up images of how it would come out and it was just too ugly. lol
I just avoid soapbar-sized pickup equipped guitars these days. haha