Originally Posted by: -im-I'm buying a new guitar, and i would like to have a little heavier distortion. i'm thinking about guitar with humbucker pickups, but not sure if i should use active or passive one? ...

Passive!

If you want to play a wide range of music, with a wide range of tones, you will need an amplifier with many capabilities, or many amplifiers. Other than the piezo bridge pickups in amplified acoustic/electric guitars, it's been my experience that active pickups actually reduce the variety of tones available to you.

So many people get sucked into thinking that the guitar is the main focus of 'their sound'. It ain't so! BB King plays Gibson ES guitars exclusively, but if he picked up a Tele, he would still sound like BB King (playing a Tele). A huge portion of what makes one player distinguishable from another is in the hands. Most of the rest is in that player's choice of effects and amplifier, and how those pieces of equipment are set up.

I sometimes jam with a band that gigs frequently. I'll slot my self into whatever gap is open. If the bass player happens to be away on that particular evening, I'll play his bass. I don't touch his settings, but when the tapes are played back, there is no mistaking who is playing on any particular song. We play differently. And we sound different.

If you want more distortion, you need to get either a distortion pedal, or an amp that will distort more. If your guitar feels good in your hands, and it can be set up so that it stays in tune in spite of what you do to it, then there's no need to replace it. You can get different picking dynamic/frequency response from it with different pickups, but distortion is almost purely a matter of what happens to the signal after it leaves the guitar.