# Ernie Ball VP-JR...6180 vs 6181



## chasacourt

I'm looking to buy a VP-JR and wondering what the difference is between the 6180 and the 6181.
Here's what I've read...
The 6180 is for use with passive electronics while the 6181 is for use with active electronics.
My question is, Do these models actually work differntly from one another?

I'm setting up an acoustic pedal board. My acoustic has a Fishman Prefix Plus onboard that uses a 9V. Does that mean I have active electronics?
I went to L&M and tried a 6180 with an acoustic with the same onboard pre-amp and it seemly worked fine.

Which model should I look for?
Thanks


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## BoogaBooga

The models for active use a 25k ohm pot and the for models for passive use 250k ohms (i'm not sure if the EB are 250k, but for sure more than 100k). Anyway.. this means if you use a volume pedal with 25k in a passive chain, it will give you a volume swell but there will be a fair bit of tone loss.

If you use a 250k (for passive) for an active chain, I think it will work fine, but noise will be increased because of the higher impedance introduced in the chain.

However, you wont damage anything either way.. (just don't hook it up to an amp output  )


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## forum_crawler

I would recommend that you try both. I just recently tried the 25K version of the pedal and it did indeed killed some of my tone. This was masked by the fact that I used a booster before the volume pedal.

Switching to a 250K pedal made all the difference and now I experience no tone loss, booster pedal or not. I didn't try with my acoustic guitar, but I would suspect the same to be the case.


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