Can anyone describe the sound of darkstar PUs?

[BrandonBass]

Those things look pretty cool, can anyone roughly describe their characteristics? Are they aggresive?

[anonymous278347457]

if i remember correctly there are soundclips on the darkstar site

[Fred Hammon]

Check out these sound clips by Ed Friedland:

http://www.guitarworld.com/archives/...uitar_-_e.html

[DavidRavenMoon]

Fat and vintage.

[ElBajista]

Basically, just like a P bass, warm, meaty, and full, with a big dose of upper-mid and treble additude. I've found them to be very agressive with the tone wide open, but can also get nice and smooth when played with a lighter touch and tone knob adjustments.

They're great pickups.

[bassman10096]

They can be compared to a P pickup. Or a great set of J's. Or lots of other things. I agree with the descriptions so far but in my experience, DSs are more responsive - both to playing and touch and to position along the strings - than a lot of pu's. The Lakland Decade and Hollowbody can produce a bit more rounded, cushy bass partly because the neck pu is relatively far up toward the middle of the string (closest to the end of the fingerboard). In a set up where the DS closest to the neck is positioned where the J or P pu would be on a Fender, the low end would be more focused and middy. DS's sound great in each of these positions, but I think one of their advantages is that they are responsive enough to highlight the characteristics of the strings wherever they are placed.

[DavidRavenMoon]

The Dark Star pickup, being a recreation of the Hagstrom pickups that were used in Guild Starfire basses, have a very wide frequency response. That's going to give you a very full sound... more top, more bottom, more everything.

So you're going to get more tone than with something like a Fender pickup. Having the widest frequency response is really the way to go.. you can then take away what you don't want, but you can't add it if it's not there in the first place!

Here's a quote from an interview with Rick Turner:

Ron Wickersham had started to mess with active electronics, first on a Fender Jazz bass for Jack Casady, and then with the Guild Starfire pickups. He was measuring pickup frequency response, and he found that the Starfire pickups (actually made by Hagstrom of Sweden) had the widest bandwidth response of anything out there, so he started working with that. Well, I came along, and my pickups were way beyond what Guild had been doing, so we started trying to figure out why.