Anemic E string on my HWY1 P-Bass, HELP!

[RONQUITO]

I´m very annoyed by this situation, two years ago i bought a brand new (2008) HWY1 P-Bass in midnight wine finish, i messed with it in my house, even played a few gigs with it the way it came, then i noticed that the response of the E string was kind of dull. Well, off went the original pickup (it had a very sweet sound BTW, in spite of its low output) and i installed a good ol´EMG.
With the overall output of the bass improved i kind of stopped noticing the difference of volume between strings (i know, i can be a meathead sometime).

Enter the HWY1 Jazz:

Half a year ago i bought a brother for my P, this sucker was a Midnight Wine J-Bass, i calibrated to my specs, put on a new set of strings, and it blew me away...even in stock form (w/original pups) the E-string barked with amazing volume and sustain...i couldn´t put it down for an hour or so, the grin on my face just couldn´t be erased...until i plugged the P-Bass.
Since then i became aware that my beloved P had a problem, i love it´s tone and playability (besides i call it my lucky bass for personal reasons), i don´t want to sell it, i´ve experimented with pickup height but the improvement vs. the proximity to the string did not pay off.

Any thoughts on this? I wanna keep my lucky bass

 

[Adam Guzzo]

Have you ever changed its strings?

 

[Davo-London]

Seriously, Adam makes a solid point.

However, there is some truth in this. After playing a P for 30 years I got a J and noticed the difference straight away. But now I have a '64P, which is very even across the strings. But my '76P is really the same as your 2008 HWY1. The only cure is to buy several E-strings (stainless) and when they start to go dull just change the E-string.

Cheers
Davo

 

[lavmonga]

Try raising the action of the E a little bit too.