The ARTEC Mudbucker. Demudding?

[David Schwab]

I have no experience with the pickups in your picture and I do not wind bass pickups so take the following with a grain of salt:

The P100 is the Edsel of pickups, so bad that Gibson doesn't make them anymore. Two 9k coils wired in parallel made for the dullest, muddiest most un-P90-like sound you could possibly get. So bad that most standard side-by-side humbuckers sound more like a P90 to me than the P100 does.

In other words, the fact that the coils are wired in parallel really doesn't do much if anything to make the pickup more detailed and articulate. Series vs. parallel with the P100 is really just a choice between loud mud and mellow mud. So I can only imagine that a 30k wind, even if it's 43 gauge, would just be even worse. ( I have a friend with an LP Special with P100's and I ended up just cutting the bottom coil of each pu out of the circuit for him. The hum was back, but it was still a massive improvement.)

I would go with Dave Schwab's suggestion of a much lower overall DCR spec but wired in series. To this day I don't know why Gibson didn't do the same with the P100.

But that was a stacked pickup, so it's different. I've heard those pickups were bad, and I'm surprised it was muddy sounding. Generally stacked pickups lack low end, since the two coils are out-of-phase with each other. I made a stacked tele bridge pickup that was 14k in series, and sounded like a vintage type Tele pickup, very bright, and not as loud as I expected. You often see stacked pickups being wound very lot, like 24k.

Gibson must have done something wrong, which is not a surprise!

Their new hum canceling P-90 is a sidewinder. When I had my rewound mudbucker in my Rick I had a series/parallel switch. Parallel is brighter with less mids.