Tesla AH-1 Active Humbucker Set

This pair of humbuckers are active, and require a 9-volt battery to run. The kit comes with 4 pots, two caps, a stereo 1/4" jack, and a cable to hook up the battery. No pickup selector switch comes with the kit, just reuse the one that's in your guitar.

The pots/caps/jack/battery cable are not wired up, so you need to be handy with a soldering iron if you are installing them yourselves. There is a little paper in the bottom of the box that shows a typical wiring scheme, and it's easy enough to do if you have even the least bit of ability to follow a schematic and solder stuff together.

As with other active pickups, the pots are in the 25K ohm range, your standard passive pickup pots are not going to be optimal. You must replace them with the pots in the kit, or with another set of pots of similar value.

The covers are a matte black with TESLA in gold lettering in the bottom corner, and are potted with epoxy.

BTW, as in another review of this product, the pot shafts are a wierd diameter, so you can't reuse the nuts/washers off a typical set of pots like Alpha or CTS. The shaft diameter is a bit smaller than normal, so unless you tweak the pot nut down, it'll want to shift some in the hole.

I installed this set of pickups in both slots of a Gibson Faded SG Special, replacing the stock 490R/490T pickups.

I don't know of any artists using these pickups, not that who else is using them matters to me at all. I got them because I wanted to try them out in lieu of EMGs or LiveWires.

I wanted something a little hotter, more aggressive and focused.

The output level is a bit lower, IMO, than the EMG 81 I have in my Fat Strat, but higher than the output of the 496R/500T set that was in my Flying V. Still, there's more than enough to drive the front end of an amp nice and hard. The frequency response seems nice and smooth, not overbalanced on one end or another, nor humped/scooped in the mids. Very crisp and clear sounding, but not shrill.

A common complaint about Active pickups is that they sound "sterile". These don't sound that way at all. They translate the guitar and amp tones nicely.

The volume pots roll off smoothly. The tone pots seem to roll off highs to a moderate extent, nothing too major--enough to darken the tone up nicely, but not to completely strangle it.

A surprising bonus with these pickups is the clean tone they give you. I'm not sure what magnets are in these pickups, but they sound more like Alnico magnets than ceramic. Nice and sweet, not hard and brittle. The differences between the bridge and neck pickups as well as playing with the tone controls give you plenty of clean flexibility.

The gain tones are extremely nice--they slam nice and hard, sustain well, you can get nice pinch harmonics (if that's your thing), and feedback is very controllable, which makes it a useful thing to keep in your arsenal. Whether you go for classic crunch or brutal metal, they will deliver the goods nicely. Not as hard and over the top as, say, an EMG 81/85 setup, but you are trading a little ultimate slamming power for much nicer low gain and clean tones.

As far as what I'm playing my SG through, it's a Peavey Triple XXX. There's lots of flexibility in that amp, you can get from Carl Perkins to Kerry King and pretty much anywhere in between....

If necessary, I'd purchase these pickups again. I like what they are doing in my SG. I've owned guitars with the typical EMG 81/85 (I had them long before Zakk Wylde did) setup, and I currently have a MIM Strat with an EMG DG20 setup with the bridge pickup replaced with an EMG 81 to make it a "Fat David Gilmour" strat. The Teslas are different enough from the EMGs that I feel like they widened the tonal palette available to me. Like I wrote earlier, they don't slam quite as hard as EMG 81/85s do, but they do give me better low gain and clean tones, which leaves me with more tonal options than I had with the EMGs.

At $80 for the whole kit, and the overall favorable comparison with other active pickups in terms of tone, there's not much you can quibble with, other than having to spend an hour or so soldering and the weird pot shaft sizes.

I've been playing for 32 years, and I've got 4 Gibsons (LP VM Studio, LP DC Special, Faded SG, Faded Flying V), my MIM Fender "Fat David Gilmour) Strat, a Squier Std. Tele, an Epiphone Casino (I LOVE that guitar), and a Univox Bass, as well as a Peavey Triple XXX amp, and several pedals.

Installing these pickups in the SG changed the character of the SG somewhat. With the 490s, it had a fairly hot tone typical of an SG. With the Tesla's, it's gone well beyond that--I can go from spanky clean to brutal simply by twisting a knob or two, or stepping on a switch... I've got much more tonal flexibility with the Teslas than with the 490s.

Active humbucker set.

Installed in an Epiphone LP. I purchased these to replace the stock pickups to liven things up some.

Now the output level is pretty much the same as an EMG 81, which I have installed in another Epiphone LP.
Same with the sound tone, very similar to EMG's. Pretty balanced and very ballsy.
Mainly play heavy rock and metal through a Line 6 111 Spider amp. These pickups sound tough !

Certainly would buy another set. For the price of these you can't go wrong.
Now the bad. The set arrived with no output jack and no nuts for the pots. This could have occoured through Tesla or through the supplier I brought them from. This proved to be a real pain in the arse as I could find NO nut to fit the pots. So I had to buy EMG pots instead.
No wiring diagrams were supplied either. I simply followed EMG's diagrams with fingers crossed and it worked.
Also forget about trying to contact Tesla either, they do not reply.
Though for the price I would highly recommend these pickups to anyone who wishes to go active. Maybe that I just got a dud box.