New to forum, and pickup questions

[Ds1]

Hello all! I'm new to the forum and I'm interested in winding some of my own pickups for the next bass I am building. I have a few questions, though. 1st, what do I have to do to get more bass/mid/treble out of my pickups? 2nd, I want to make a split P style stacked humbucker for a crappy bass I have. Does anyone know how I can do that?

Thanks a bunch!

[Ruel]

You can PM David Schwab. He is the guy to ask when it comes to bass pickups.

[David King]

You can PM David Schwab. He is the guy to ask when it comes to bass pickups.

You could do that but it kind of defeats the purpose of the forum. Plenty of folks know about bass pickups, they aren't very different from guitar pickups as a matter of fact.

The tone you get from a pickup is going to depend on a lot of things.
The type of magnet you use, the coil dimensions, the wire gauge and most importantly the number of turns of wire and wire gauge.

Most of these differences are going to be subtle and might not even matter that much to you. Best bet is to find a bass pickup you like and recreate it as a starting place. Once you get it sounding like the original you'll probably have an idea where to head next.

As to a split P, stacked humbucker I think you might be confused about terms here. A P pickup (after 1955 or so) is the definition of a split coil humbucker -two coils each picking up two strings only.

A stacked humbucker is one coil on top of an other. Perhaps you want a stacked 1951 single coil P pickup?

There would be no point in splitting and stacking the same pickup. That's like vented disk, drum brakes on a car or an inner tube inside a tubeless tire...

[Ds1]

Oh ok i get the whole split P thing now. But on the different tone subject, how would I (lets use as an example) get more bass response out of my pickups?

[David Schwab]

Oh ok i get the whole split P thing now. But on the different tone subject, how would I (lets use as an example) get more bass response out of my pickups?

You can do either of two things... wind more wire on the pickup to roll off the top end... that will give a dark tone, but you also loose low end.

Or wind less wire than normal on the pickup. It will have lower output, but it will have more low end (it will extend deeper), and more high end as well.

There's a lot of things that determine the tone of a bass. I'd bet more than anything that the lack of low end is the crappy bass more than the pickups. To me most of the tone of the bass is in the design of the neck.

Getting back to pickups, the P bass coil is a different size and shape from something like a Jazz pickup, and that also has something to do with the tone. it's not something you can give an easy answer on.

[David King]

You really need to define what you mean by low end..
Humbuckers with a wide aperture sound "fat" to me but a single coil will go deeper. The problem is ears don't hear very well below 100 hz so going there is very expensive since you need to boost the volume so much (and that means upping the watts by orders of magnitude) to get audible effects.

It's probably better to use psychoacoustic effects to make the brain think it's hearing deep bass. Luckily the brain is really good at filling in the bottom octave using upper partials. You just have to know how the brain does this to tap in to it. There are lots of articles and plenty of off-the-shelf-systems like Aphex "big bottom", BBE "sonic maximizer" etc. that try to fool the brain with a dinky 3" woofer.

Basically the easiest way to get more bass is to move the pickup away from the bridge and closer to the end of the fingerboard. The next trick is to choose magnets and armatures that can go deeper. Some combination or ceramic and steel is probably best but that's a whole world to try out. Tall, narrow coils with all the wire as close to the center of the aperture as possible are supposed to be good for bass.

I still think dead, flat-wound strings with a lucky metallurgical formula, dipped in month-old chicken grease will do way more than any stinking pickup to get the depth thing going on.

[David Schwab]

I still think dead, flat-wound strings with a lucky metallurgical formula, dipped in month-old chicken grease will do way more than any stinking pickup to get the depth thing going on.

That's because you hear less top end, not because you hear more low end. And the decay of the harmonics is quicker.

What we think is low end on bass, is really the harmonics. We barely hear the fundamental. If you use a low pass filter to remove all the harmonics, you will end up with one of those synth dub bass tones, and will hardly be able to detect the pitch of the note! So generally the upper harmonics overpower the lower ones. Roll off the top end, and the bottom seems fatter. But the bottom hasn't changed.

So instead of hearing that 41 Hz low E, we are hearing harmonics in the 75-150 Hz range and up.

The more resistance a pickup has, the less low and high frequency response. It becomes a wide band pass response due to loading. This is the tone we are all familiar with.

The first time I used a buffer with my Hi-A pickups in one of my Rics I noticed how the pickup seemed to go deeper with the buffer engaged. It wasn't an EQ style hump in the bass range, it actually extended lower and higher.

My experiments with winding low resistance coils showed me that I can wind a bridge pickup that has more low end than most neck pickups. When I only had one prototype pickup in my bass, at the bridge, the neck pickup was an EMG-40P5, and the bridge pickup was much deeper sounding. I mostly played the bridge pickup then, because it was all I needed... had the full range of tones right there. I actually engage the 75Hz roll off on my mixer at times to get a tighter (lesser) bottom end more like a Jazz bass.

I sold some low Z pickups to a guy that builds basses for a lot of gospel players. They like that low B to get under the keyboards. Most of his comments to me was about how deep the pickups go and how "it emulates a soulful James Jamison, bluesy Motown vibe, but with an even more solid low-end."

To me the pickups are hi-fi, but it shows what you can do with more instead of less. You can take away, but you get something that's not there in the first place.

[Ds1]

Thats cool stuff.... David, how could I wind a pickup sort of like the low z bridge pickup your talking about? the bass I am building is a 6 string and I happen to play a good amount of gospel/ funk and boy do I love that low B

[David King]

While I agree that some deeper low end excursion can be built into the pickups, you still need it coming from the bass in the first place. If the strings aren't moving the right way because the neck isn't stiff enough or the bridge sucks or the body won't give it up -you're still stuck. Whether the strings are filtering out the partials you don't want hear or the wood is doing the filtering or the pickup is doing it's filtering, it doesn't really matter, you are still filtering aren't you?

DS1,
You can search out Dave Schwab's pickup photos on this forum, he's posted them several times and discussed their inner workings in some detail I believe. Or you can just buy a set.

BTW what's your amp setup?

[Ds1]

All of your points are very true David. Amp setup right now is not the greatest.
All I did was went out and bought a Behringer head and a used Genz-Benz 410 from a friend of mine for cheap because I needed plenty of power for gigs. If I am recording, though, I usually just interface into a computer and use amp modeling plug-ins.