Hello all. I've had my P Bass for 20 years and been only relatively satisfied with its sound all along although I'm very attached to it for its shape and the way it feels playing.. I use heavy flatwounds and keep tuned to C F Bb Eb because I use the low notes a lot. I've long thought about pickup replacement, but what led me to put the question here is a friend who just got an extremely inexpensive bass (140 euros on mailorder here in spain) whose sound is exactly what i'm looking for. Basically it sounds fat, its basic sound is like a dub sound with loads of bass and definition, which my bass isn't capable of to anywhere near the same degree. I just plugged in that thing and i was hearing some really cool reggae bass using different playing techniques like palm muting, stacatto etc. funk also worked great and walking bass lines sounded closer to an upright than my own bass, especially picking over the frets rather than near the pickups, which I also do on my regular bass. What I want to know is if I could install the same pickup system on my P. Here's the bass in question, more than just slightly reminiscent of the beatles bass obviously:
http://www.thomann.de/es/harley_benton_beatbass.htm . what I liked particularly about the setup is that there was an individual volume knob for each pickups, allowing me to look for just the amount of each pickup i wanted. So I was wondering if you people could (1) tell me what kind of pickups these are or appear to be on my friends bass (2) whether installing those and the necessary rewiring on a P body is advisable and even possible. I'd probably get the parts and let a professional do the modification. I'd like to keep my bass and get that sound from it. Incidentally I normally play through a tube direct box into either a PA system or a computer sound card, both of which i tried with the miracle "beatles" bass. Thanks for advice on this one....
