A triple mudbucking bass

[Harper Oliver]

To start off, here’s some details about my plan for this bass. It is a BASS guitar. I want it to be dark, deep, heavy, all the low end tonal words you can think of. Mahogany body, high mass-string through body-brass bridge, either chrome round wounds or tape wounds (haven’t decided), bent headstock, and neck through body.

The question comes in the pickups. I plan to put 3 mudbuckers in it. A neck pickup from a magnum 1/2 bass, a model one in the middle, and an eb or sg at the bridge.

•Will the wiring and blending work?
•impendance problems?
•The magnum pickup might have an active mode, would that clash with the other pickups?
•is there a better order to put these pickups in?

 

[two fingers]

I would mock it up on a board and experiment. That's a lot going on. It could be amazing. It could be a tonal mess. I imagine none of us have ever encountered that exact combination. As such, we likely won't be much help in determining which way you should go.

Seriously, route out a board. Leave the wiring dangling loose. Screw in a bridge on one end and a tuner or two on the other to scale. Then just "mess around" with it.

If you have an old beater project bass you could just route a channel down the middle where the pickups would go and play with it that way.

But I don't think anyone will be able to predict the outcome, sonically speaking, of what you're looking at doing.

Good luck with it either way.

 

[Harper Oliver]

Hey I like that idea! I’ll see what works then

 

[dwizum]

A simpler way to test weird pickup combinations is to use an existing bass with the pickups removed. Lay it flat on a table and lay strips of wood or other inert material alongside the strings near where you would like each pickup located, to act as shims. Set the pickups on top of your shims, pointing down at the strings. Wire the pickups to the controls you'd like to test and lay the controls and wiring off to the side. Effectively, you're building an upside-down pickup/wiring harness on top of the bass. Then you can pluck some strings, try the different wiring and switching combos, even different pickup positions - and you can return everything to normal a few minutes later, without having to do any woodwork.