The start of the electronics journey of improving the tone on your bass. Best Bass Gear carries a large assortment of pickups for many different basses with multiple string configurations to choose from.
You probably have two immediate questions just from the title of this article alone, that being: Why are we talking about the SX Ursa 2 6-string from Rondo (also in sunburst), a sub-$200 bass guitar? Why would anyone bother to buy a sub-$200 bass, only to put more than $200 worth of pickup upgrades into … Read more
What is coil tapping? Most of the time when someone says “coil tap,” they are actually referring a coil split. Actual coil tapping is remarkably rare these days. The idea with a coil tap is when winding a single coil pickup, you stop the winder part way through the winding process, attach a new lead … Read more
Below may be the best 3 minutes and 17 seconds of video you ever watch. Clyde Clark, President of Bartolini, explains in plain English (which is the best way to explain anything), how pickups work. The most important thing to take from the video is that a pickup is part of an electrical circuit. Not … Read more
In a recorded phone conversation with Larry of Aero Pickups, he discussed many things, and one of them was single-pole-piece-per-string vs. two-pole-pieces-per-string. I always say when you have two pole pieces per string, the note is picked up twice every time the string vibrates over the magnets. There have been times when I’ve sent single-pole-piece-per-string … Read more
We asked our Facebook audience what type of pickup they prefer, be it single-coil straight, split-coil, dual-coil, rail design or something else… …and now it’s time to ask you. What’s your favorite bass pickup type, and why do you prefer it? Multiple answers are OK, because some players use specific pickups for specific applications. Post … Read more
Recently, we posted an open question on Facebook asking what your favorite pickup is. Feel free to check that out. Do you agree with the comments on that discussion? There were a lot of EMG and Seymour Duncan fans out there. What’s your favorite brand of bass pickup (even if it’s one we don’t carry)?
Something new and cool in the BBG shop is the Nordstrand Dual Blade 5 Neo pickups, which are available for the bridge, neck or as a set. What makes the DB5Neo pickups cool? It’s a dual coil blade configuration along with neodymium magnets (meaning you don’t have to worry about pole spacing,) and is optimized … Read more
You may have noticed on products such as the Seymour Duncan Antiquity Series that part of its selling point is this thing known as “scatter wind” manufacturing process. What is scatter winding? When wire is wound into coils on a pickup, the most basic definition of scatter-wound means “non-uniform.” Imagine a spool of thread that … Read more
I’ll admit up front that the title of this article is a totally unfair question for the reason it’s actually very difficult to describe in words what a pickup sounds like; it’s kind of like trying to describe what an orange tastes like (yeah, think about that one). 🙂 That being said, I’m going on … Read more
When going by the appearance of a pickup alone, one can get easily confused because there are pickups that have hum-canceling technology in them even though they look like a single-coil, and there are also humbuckers that look like humbuckers but are in fact tri-coil or even quad-coil. To answer the question of what counts … Read more
