Attention Lane Poor Seekers! Especially Modulus Flea bass owners!

I know a guy Adam Charette from APC repair in Rhode Island, who used to work for Lane Poor when he made pickups. I have known him for a few years and have bought some Lane Poor pickups from his stash (his stash is now empty.) Chris Weil (Angus) has also dealt with him directly and someone on here (I think abluesbassist) had a 6 string built by him. All around great guy as anyone who has dealt with him will say. He does alot of repair and fretwork on both guitars and basses in eastern RI/ southern MA.

Well he has rereleased an sonically exact copy of the Lane Poor MM4 pickup, humbucker version. I know because I have serial number 1 in my hands and I tested it against an actual LP pickup. I can provide clips if someone can provide a place to put them. The clips are both pickups installed in a 1997 Modulus Flea bass with all the electronics bypassed (straight to cable.) The APC pickup is very close (maybe even slightly more focused) and it retains all the character of the original. I would not be able to tell them apart without being told.

At the moment there is no circle logo on the pickup just a blank face. It is epoxy sealed like the LPs with the same type of wires coming out of it. Essentially it is the same pickup sonically and visually minus the logo.

I am pretty sure that there is going to end up being a waiting list because these are handmade. So go to www.guitardr.com and call him or send him an email.

http://www.guitardr.com/contactus.html

http://www.guitardr.com

I just spoke to him today so it's official!

On another note, he has produced for me a copy of the LP precision pickup but I will not be testing it until finals are done (2 weeks.) He does make a very good very quiet jazz bass set loosely based on Lane's however he decided to change the design because the Lane Poor Jazz pickups were notoriously low output. About the Js he also said that the failure rate was very high when making the originals, because they were trying to fit too much into a tight space. So he changed it.

5ers aren't in the works yet AFAIK because he doesn't have a source for covers without polepiece holes, but I think we are working on that (I helped him find the MM4 covers.) I didn't talk to him about soapbar sizes. I am fairly sure that he would work with you if you found blank covers (of any kind) without holes, and you can order those covers in a reasonable quantity (not in the thousands of covers.)

Take care,
Joe

Oh yeah you guys need to check but I believe the Flea 5 string actually uses an MM4 string pickup. If this is true then the APC MM4 would work for it!

get me an email addy and I'll send them... I will get pics of pickups and links of clips up here as soon as I can...

Updated: OK so let me explain something about my playing and my setup to record these.

My playing: I have probably the brightest tone of anyone I know because I don't have much meat on my fingers. You can read a little bit about why I sound so bright here http://www.talkbass.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1365647&highlight=bony#post1365647 It's like I am playing with bone and fingernails. I only mention it because these sound clips are gonna sound thin to some of you, but it's only because of my hands. These 2 clips are only meant to be compared to one another to see if they are similiar, not to represent the tone you would get in your own bass. I did make sure to play over the same part of the strings for both pickups for consistency (Just off to the neck side of the pickup an inch or so.) I also played the same stuff and most of the lines I play use all 4 strings. My playing was a bit off the day i recorded so forgive that. I tend to play sloppily when i am tired.

My setup: A 1997 Flea bass with the graphite neck. I completely bypassed the electronics and went straight to the cable on both pickups. When I changed the pickups I measured the distance the pickup sat from the strings on both the E and G side and made sure they were the same for both setups. I of course kept the same strings and played the same lines. The 2 recordings are about half an hour apart and I was trying to keep everything the same for both setups. I ran the bass into a Sansamp PBDDI without any of the tone controls engaged (basically I was just using it as a DI.) Then I went into Soundblaster Extigy (used to be very highly regarded for single or 2 track recording) then into the program Audacity on my windows laptop. I decided to save them in WAV format as MP3 is useless for something like this.

If there are any other questions feel free to ask. Thank you Michael for hosting these.

You may need to right click on these links and hit "save target as..." The LP.wav is the lane poor. The apclp.wav file is the APC.

http://www.talkbass.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1365647&highlight=bony#post1365647
Invalid Link Removed

Remember that these are only meant to be compared to each other, not to judge the tone. I probably should have a friend play through these.

yeah i think they will all be handbuilt

Thanks Ralph...

yeah Ralph (Rapisme) has the new version of jazz pickups. I do not, but probably sometime this summer I will have a set to try out. I may do a comparison but as much as I know they aren't supposed to be true copies. They are however improvements on the old design. The MM and P pickup are supposed to be true to the originals and I can tell you that the MMs are very true. I will be able to comment on the precision pickup in a few weeks.

Soundclips are up in post #4 above. I may eventually ask luknfur to do a comparison on these and do a write-up since he has documented stuff so well in the past (see Dr Dimento's pickup experiments)

Soundclips are up in post #4 above.