Pickup replacement wiring

[meegs]

I recently picked up a 1989 Soloist (my 4th one). It's awesome but the previous owner had done some messing with the electronics. He added a kill switch where the volume control used to be. The volume control is now where one of the tone knobs should be. Anyway, I was thinking of scrapping that whole mess. It definitely has Jackson single coils and possibly a Jackson humbucker but I'm not sure. My question is...does anyone have a recommendation for which humbucker to get and how to get back to normal wiring? I play mainly metal through a Mesa Dual Rec halfstack. Also, assuming these are all Jackson pickups now...can I just replace the humbucker and not rewire it? Can you mix active and passive pickups? (Lots of questions sorry!)

[DonP]

You can mix active and passive pickups but you might not like the results. The actives will overpower the passives. Passive pickups usually have volume and tone controls in the 250K - 500K range. Actives are usually 25K to 50K. For these reasons it's usually best to go all active or all passive. Jackson has the J-90C which is pretty kick-ass, similar to a Duncan Distortion.

[Grim]

You're not going to want to mix active-and passive. believe me, it's HELL.

[warlok]

Does it have the factory active electronics? They're not active pickups, just active pots, etc. See what pickups are in there first. You may have a good HB already.