To add to my earlier post. The biggest thing I've noticed apart from the obvious one of strings and technique...is the thickness of the neck..ie back to front. My CV has a thick neck and it absolutely sounds fuller and more punchy than standard skinny necks.
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Expensive vs cheap pickups?
- Thread starter Drawoh
- Start date
I changed pickups for bragging rights, not for tone.
Let me guess - the outcome is either:
a. the expensive pickups were way better than the cheap ones,
b. the expensive pickups were no better than the cheap ones,
c. the cheap ones were better than the expensive ones.
The thing is, it's only valid for the scope of the test and you can't extrapolate whichever finding applies therefore to "all" pickups..
a. the expensive pickups were way better than the cheap ones,
b. the expensive pickups were no better than the cheap ones,
c. the cheap ones were better than the expensive ones.
The thing is, it's only valid for the scope of the test and you can't extrapolate whichever finding applies therefore to "all" pickups..
From the video it was obvious to me which one is the US Fender. There's just more high-end content in the sound. Then again whenever anybody says they don't hear a difference, I do, so maybe I should be a engineer.
That said, I think the difference in high-end pick-ups can be a bigger range of nice sounding tones. It's not a given, since high-end pickups can still have tones you don't vibe with, but my personal experience is that cheaper pickups and electronics have a larger area of harsh tones. So in the end nice high-end pickups can be easier to live with, which is what I care about the most.
That said, I think the difference in high-end pick-ups can be a bigger range of nice sounding tones. It's not a given, since high-end pickups can still have tones you don't vibe with, but my personal experience is that cheaper pickups and electronics have a larger area of harsh tones. So in the end nice high-end pickups can be easier to live with, which is what I care about the most.
i have cheapies, premiums, and 'in-the-middles' = all of them do their job, and none of them "sound bad." in recent years i've used anything but EMGs (i'm a long time user of EMGs), on a lark, just to hear what they're like, i.e., something different for a change. all my axes have different pickups and they all sound good to me!
i like good tones but i'm not a "tone chaser" --- i'm not looking for a specific tone to light up my life.
i'm always looking for a sound that will be useful ATM and that compliments my goals for the playdown. i've had but one negative experience (and it was recently) when i took a new ax to a gig before thoroughly vetting the new electronics. i was in over my head with an audere J4 preamp. after the gig i spent some time with the new system and now it works great for me.i think i might prefer some pickups over others based on the convenience of reasonably matching outputs from one ax to another, but even then: if the pickups (active or passive) sound good to me on a particular ax at the rehearsal/gig they'll be fine, overall, for what i'm doing.
TL;DR: all of them seem to work for me, but i'm not that picky....i just want my axes to sound like a bass...i like 'em all!
IMHO almost all of the tone of an electric instrument comes from the pickup/string combo (then obviously the rest of the signal chain). It's the one area I'll spend in without worrying.
Not that expensive necessarily = better, but guys will agonize and spend fortunes over changes that aren't going to make nearly as big a difference. Everybody likes what they like but pickups have a massive impact on sound
Not that expensive necessarily = better, but guys will agonize and spend fortunes over changes that aren't going to make nearly as big a difference. Everybody likes what they like but pickups have a massive impact on sound
If you use a lot of preamp and drive, then yer going to amplify the NOISE that comes through your pickups. If you are changing from stock single coils to aftermarket humbuckers - I think you would see a big difference!
I actually did a humbucking (dual-coil) J-pup "shootout" a couple of years ago... not concerned with the tone of each set, but rather how well each was resistant to HUM AND NOISE (I lived in a place with 25KV powerlines a dozen feet from my steel roof, and was trying to make recordings up on the third floor...)
Anyway, I had collected various brand-new sets of Fender, Duncan, Dimarzio, Sadowsky, a few different Bartolinis, EMG, Lace, and (something of a wildcard) CALIG (purchased on eBay for a whole $30 each!). Every one of those sets was "humbucking" ( mostly dual-coil side-by-side configuration). And my actual WINNERS, by a large margin were one of the Barts, and the CALIG set! (which cost like 1/3rd of most of the others...)
Those inexpensive CALIG winners went on to live in my 'shortscale starcaster'
My experience in pickup changes is very small but I'm hesitant on spending too much on them as my results have not been great.
My Franken Fretless is a Warmoth neck on a Squier CV body. I have been chasing a tone I like on that bass for years.
I have a Warmoth necked Franken Pbass with a Bill Lawrence P46 which I love so I thought I'd try a set of their J45s in the fretless.
The first thing I noticed when pulling the stock pickups out was that they appear to be very well made. The difference in tone of the new pickups was minimal at best.
I put one of those Squier pickups in the bridge of my Squier Jag Short Scale which was an improvement to my ears.
I'm thinking about trying an Audere pre in the fretless.
Ironically, it's the only bass that our guitarist has commented on the tone saying after one song "man, I love the sound of that fretless.".
My Franken Fretless is a Warmoth neck on a Squier CV body. I have been chasing a tone I like on that bass for years.
I have a Warmoth necked Franken Pbass with a Bill Lawrence P46 which I love so I thought I'd try a set of their J45s in the fretless.
The first thing I noticed when pulling the stock pickups out was that they appear to be very well made. The difference in tone of the new pickups was minimal at best.
I put one of those Squier pickups in the bridge of my Squier Jag Short Scale which was an improvement to my ears.
I'm thinking about trying an Audere pre in the fretless.
Ironically, it's the only bass that our guitarist has commented on the tone saying after one song "man, I love the sound of that fretless.".
I'm a nerd who enjoys the work involved in swapping pickups / etc... but there are definitely diminishing returns, and I feel like you hit a brick wall pretty fast.
- My Nashville tele sounds better (to my ears) now that I've converted it to a stock-style tele with a $60 set of vintage GFS pickups than it did with the the noiseless Fender pickups that came in it stock. I feel like the noiseless pickups were noiseless at the cost of tone.
- My HSS Squier Strat that came stock with pretty 'meh' Duncan Designed pickups is now rocking 920D Texas Vintage pickups in the neck and bridge, and the spare GFS pickup from the Nashville tele in the middle, and it sounds great.
- My Player P-Bass with Fender CS pickups.... I don't think moving from stock player pickups to CS pickups did nearly as much as the upgrades on my six strings.
- My 70s RI Jazz with CS pickups... same deal. But the wiring in that bass is currently significantly different than it was stock... it's got a Volume, Tone, and 4-position pickup selector (with series/parallel) out of a Dingwall.
really depends on:
your taste/preference
what the stock pup is
what you replace it with.
when I swapped my carvin's original pickups for a full set of nordstrands, the electronics cost 2/3 of what the bass cost me. it was so worth it. it's an objectively great sounding bass now.
some instruments will come stock with surprisingly good sounding (though perhaps in some regard inexpensive) pickups.
your taste/preference
what the stock pup is
what you replace it with.
when I swapped my carvin's original pickups for a full set of nordstrands, the electronics cost 2/3 of what the bass cost me. it was so worth it. it's an objectively great sounding bass now.
some instruments will come stock with surprisingly good sounding (though perhaps in some regard inexpensive) pickups.
I have a MIJ jazz with some questionable soldering and some off market pieces Fender suggested I replace with such and such. I took to my tech and he played it and it sounded like a million dollar bass in his hands. He said I would waste money doing anything to it because it plays so nicely. I took it home and it went back to sounding like a pos foreign made bass with cheap parts. That should tell you what my tech knows! lol!
I changed pickups for bragging rights, not for tone.
This but unironically.
I don't think it's so much the actual labor of building each pickup as much as it is the labor of learning to build pickups that match specific goals - i.e. R&D. That's really what separates one pickup from another in a given style. It's not that the "better" pickup costs more to make or uses more expensive materials, it's more that the "better" pickup happens to have been tweaked over lots of iterating by someone who has invested time into understanding pickup design, in order to have a certain very specific result. Versus a cheap generic pickup, which is probably either just a vague copy of a popular design, or was made to have a very middle of the road outcome that won't disappoint casual, less enthusiastic customers (who are probably the vast majority of the consumer market, versus people like us who consider replacing pickups).
Buying a $250 boutique pickup as a replacement for your cheap generic stock pickup should not be done in the hopes that the boutique pickup is somehow better in terms of having superior materials or that it took more labor to build. It's basically a statement of "I believe the person making this has invested time into developing a pickup that matches my specific needs, versus the generic $25 stock pickup my bass came with, which was developed mostly to have broad appeal."
Yeah, I was a bit surprised reading here that people don't think pickups make a big difference. Excuse me? Pickups are *the* difference (well, and strings like you said). Sure, with EQ you can make one pickup sound like another, but how many of us play with a graphic EQ on stage? If a pickup has a weird sound that you can't improve with whatever preamp you're using, then its a bad pickup for you. Not saying its a bad pickup, but a bad combination for whatever you are trying to accomplish sonically. With unlimited gear almost anything can be done, but that's just not the case for most of us. I choose pickups that sound great with my rig with the least amount of knob turning.
Blindly being able to pick out one from another is one thing, but it doesn't really matter. I've owned a Fralin stock wound p-bass pickup, an Aguilar P, and a Duncan Antiquity II. If you took the three of them, popped them in the same bass, recorded them then played me the samples, I guarantee you that I wouldn't be able to tell you which one was which with any greater success than I would have flipping a coin. But I also guarantee you that I would hear a difference between the three.
At the end of the day, your playing style probably has the greatest impact on anything, but if you're going to have multiple basses, I would rather have ones that let me achieve the sound I want without having to mess around too much and fight against the tone of the bass to get a specific sound, and pickups play a huge roll there.
As to expensive vs cheap, I haven't seen any night and day correlation. I've played expensive pickups that didn't do it for me, and cheap pickups I loved. Where its worth spending more money is customer service. I was happy to pay a higher price for a couple Fralin pickups because I was able to pick up the phone, ask for Lindy, describe to him the tone I was after, the amp I was using, the play style I had, and he wound me a pickup that absolutely nailed what I was after. Plus if I was unhappy with it or wanted a different sound he would rewind it for me. To me, that piece of mind was 100% worth spending money on.
Years later I switched over to an Aguilar set of pickups and you know what? For the time and place I was in, those off the shelf pickups were perfect for what I was doing and I got rid of the Fralin.
Later I played a GFS p-bass pickup in a buddies bass that I thought was perfect for a specific tone I was after, but for one reason or another I never ordered a set. But I'm pretty sure I could have happily replaced my Aggys with the GFS, for a while at least.
After reading more of this thread and seeing more replies, I hope that more people land here. Buy a specific pickup to get a specific sound. Don't buy an expensive pickup solely because it's 'Better than stock.' Buy it because it does a specific thing that you want.
Early on in my foray into working on instruments, I did replace the pickups in two of my basses because I wanted 'better' pickups... but, the difference was negligible. Once I started chasing certain tones, the path became clear.
I did the same thing with pedals, buying a bunch of crap because it was cool when I first started. Now I've backed off and started swapping and buying things because I'm chasing specific sounds.
I was going to say in response to this that if there was one piece of musical advice I could go back and give my younger self, it would be "don't blow all your money on pedals. They don't made you play better and you are wasting all your money"
But as soon as I though it I realized that was a dumb though, as if I didn't blow my money on pedals I probably would have blown it on something even stupider. Maybe gear addiction is the lesser of a few evils for a young musician.
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