Pickups for $3.99?

[WilliamSandoval]

4 String Open Humbucker Pickups For Fender Jazz Bass | eBay

Yeah... Right...

[LoveThatBass]

They look like cheap asian import pickups

[WilliamSandoval]

That's what I was thinking.

[line6man]

$3.99 is the starting bid.

[WilliamSandoval]

If you were selling brand new Seymors, would you start your bid at 3.99? I don't think so...

6 hours left, no bidders...

[Thunder Pulse]

Originally Posted by WilliamSandoval

If you were selling brand new Seymors, would you start your bid at 3.99? I don't think so...

You clearly know nothing about selling on eBay.

[LoveThatBass]

Originally Posted by Thunder Pulse

You clearly know nothing about selling on eBay.

+1

[bassbenj]

Originally Posted by LoveThatBass

They look like cheap asian import pickups

Yeah. So? Hey, what is a Jazz pickup? It's a cheap plastic case (costs a few cents in any country), a coil of wire (better wire will have better insulation but that's it), some steel pole pieces (what does a half inch of steel rod cost?) and a ceramic magnet glued under the whole thing. Voila! Get a pair for $13, how can you go wrong?

OF course they are NOT tweaked for tone or output or anything else which is what you pay for when you buy some boutique aftermarket pups. But hey for the price it's probably worth a try just for grins. I just bought a sack of MM 5 string pickups at $20 each. How can I go wrong? There isn't THAT much difference between pickups.

I do have a bit of reluctance to order from Asia. (My bank does too, that won't let me use my Visa card in Asian countries) But for experimenting etc. it's a hard deal to beat. Now if you want your tone "just so" then you'll have to fork out that $200 per pickup to get just the one you want.

[LoveThatBass]

Originally Posted by bassbenj

Yeah. So? Hey, what is a Jazz pickup? It's a cheap plastic case (costs a few cents in any country), a coil of wire (better wire will have better insulation but that's it), some steel pole pieces (what does a half inch of steel rod cost?) and a ceramic magnet glued under the whole thing. Voila! Get a pair for $13, how can you go wrong?

OF course they are NOT tweaked for tone or output or anything else which is what you pay for when you buy some boutique aftermarket pups. But hey for the price it's probably worth a try just for grins. I just bought a sack of MM 5 string pickups at $20 each. How can I go wrong? There isn't THAT much difference between pickups.

I do have a bit of reluctance to order from Asia. (My bank does too, that won't let me use my Visa card in Asian countries) But for experimenting etc. it's a hard deal to beat. Now if you want your tone "just so" then you'll have to fork out that $200 per pickup to get just the one you want.

I have to say "Yeah , so, what is a guitar, some wood, some plastic, some metal" We all know you can get a cheap and many times piece of crap, a medium or high price guitar that is sometimes really good and sometimes no so good."
So I have to ask what is in your comment but a bunch of meaningless words that render emotion but no real value to anyone. I have had pickups like these with the ceramic bar magnet on back from asia and they were not worth the money spent on them and others that were usable but none fantastic.

[SurferJoe46]

Pickups for $3.99?

Thought this might be about picking up a $3.99 working girl. I wuz wrong.

[darkstorm]

No name pups. No mfg name on them at all. Absurd low price. Prob on par with the kind you find on cheap cheap basses that you replace as soon as possible. Heck the stock pups on ones cheap cheap bass might be better then these even. Seller isnt even naming the pups correctly as Jazz pups.

[Gear_Junky]

I don't see a problem with that price, lol. That looks exactly like the pickups I would throw away when I get an SX bass. That's probably what they cost them in the first place.

What I'm trying to understand is the exact intent of this thread (scratch-scratch)

[leonche64]

Originally Posted by Gear_Junky

That looks exactly like the pickups I would throw away when I get an SX bass. That's probably what they cost them in the first place.

Bingo.

[bassbenj]

Originally Posted by LoveThatBass

I have to say "Yeah , so, what is a guitar, some wood, some plastic, some metal" We all know you can get a cheap and many times piece of crap, a medium or high price guitar that is sometimes really good and sometimes no so good."
So I have to ask what is in your comment but a bunch of meaningless words that render emotion but no real value to anyone. I have had pickups like these with the ceramic bar magnet on back from asia and they were not worth the money spent on them and others that were usable but none fantastic.

So all I have to say is "Yeah, so I guess the entire world is ruled by your opinion." So tell us again how you "get what you pay for" every time! What is this but a bunch of myth that circulates among those not willing to make any judgements themselves?

Personally I find the pickups on my SX basses absolutely killer. And they are EXACTLY what I "emotionally" described. And even if they weren't for the price you are paying you can easily justify tearing them apart to "adjust" the tone. If you aren't satisfied unless you are paying a hundred bucks and that convinces you that since you spent a lot the tone "must" be great, well good for you.

Personally I've bought a LOT of "junk" pickups at various places. Some, I must honestly report, WERE total junk! Others have since been put into some of my instruments creating some of the most amazing sounds that money CAN'T buy! Tone is where you find it, not by how much you pay. Cripes how can TWO new pickups for $15 not be "worth the money"? They'd have to be totally dead. No wait. I've paid that for just plastic pickup cases alone! They'd have to be dead PLUS melted!

Now if you had told us, "I bought some of these EXACT pickups and found they were crap for this and this and this reason." THEN I'd say you'd have made a worthwhile contribution to information here. As it stands, all we have is your opinion based on nothing but your mythology and imagination!

[SurferJoe46]

Bravo!

[Gear_Junky]

Just to make sure I don't come off as a snob - I fully believe that the "you get what you paid for" mantra is relative and has many dimensions. It's not always linear. It's not always going hyperactively up like Dow Jones.

I love SX instruments (and some of their stock pickups), I like most of GFS pups I tried and the 1 set of Toneriders P-bass pups. I fully believe that there's islands of value along the line of "you get what you paid for".

But for me, the cheap mass-production "stock" pickups are usually suspect, not because of price, but because of lack of design. A pickup that was wound to specs, even if it's cheap, to me has "potential" to be good. A pickup that was mega-mass-produced just to fill a hole in a pickguard (knowing full well that it's either a christmas gift to be discarded later or it's for "modders") - a pickup like that to me lacks interest. Plus, I usually prefer alnico pickups, so again, the ceramic bar underneath is a deviation from original design.

That's my own take that I rely on personally. I don't presume to force it onto others

[chuck norriss]

can you take a cheap crap pickup & modify it?

[LoveThatBass]

I see attributes in some cheap pickups that you just do not see in a good one such as a big hunk of magnet material stuck to the bottom fo the pickup itself. Also, I have owned 3 SX basses and none of them had tone to write home about until a good pickups such as a Seymour Duncan was installed. This was expecially true in the P and P/J basses. The J's seemed "usable" but the P just lacked the definition I have come to expect with SD's, Lindy Fralins and even GFS pickups.

[Gear_Junky]

Originally Posted by chuck norriss

can you take a cheap crap pickup & modify it?

modify as in completely rewind and replace non-magnetic poles with real alnicos? it'll run more $ than either a GFS or a Tonerider. Then again, if you wind your own pickups and the sum of parts is cheaper than buying them from say StewMac, by all means.

It's popular to swap out ceramic magnets in guitar PAF-style humbuckers and P90 pickups. Just about everyone says that improves tone.

But a P-style or a J-style pickup is supposed to have alnico pole magnets, not a bar-style magnet on the bottom, so that makes for a different pickup design, in my amateur opinion.

Every pickup like that (be it bass or a strat pickup) that I've tried has sounded ok, even good, but never great.

The 2 SX P-basses that I personally held/played sounded very much like a Precision, but after putting in an alnico pickup the sound was a lot sweeter.

Just my $.02.

[i_got_a_mohawk]

Originally Posted by WilliamSandoval

If you were selling brand new Seymors, would you start your bid at 3.99? I don't think so...

6 hours left, no bidders...

I'd start at $0.99 actually.

IME, taking two identical items, the one with the lowest starting bid (everything else being the same) will gain more interest and generally sell for more than one with a higher starting bid.