Finally got the new pickups in me Fodera. There is now a D.Allen pickup in the neck position and a Lindy Fralin 5% overwound lateral humbucker at the bridge. The tone is finally how I've been wanting it since I got the bass.
I've never been a fan of the EMG's. They always sounded way over compressed and unnatural to me. The lows were too tight and the highs too rolled off IMO. They also never sounded nearly as good as my passive basses when going through a tube amp. They were perfectly silent, which was awesome.
Now the bass has truly thick lows and a much more present upper midrange. The pickups sound great in passive mode and the Pope Flexcore I'm running does a great job of boosting gain whilst keeping the character of the pickups.
I have been having some trouble with grounding however. The bass had no ground cable run from the bridge originally, so I had to have a luthier do that for me. When I first hooked the pickups up, they were out of phase with each other. I flipped the wires on the P pickup. The out of phase problem went away, but there was still a lot of buzz and the P pickup sounded very muddy.
I switched the Fralin around instead, tightened the pots down to the bass and used a star washer and screw to help ground the bridge wire, an unshielded braided wire, on its way to the preamp. I didn't solder a separate wire from copper shielding to the preamp. Also, the pickup cavities are unshielded. I'm going to shield them, but I'm a little worried trying to dig the foam out that Fodera put in there. I know that the cavities being unshielded can cause buzz, but it's buzzing more than my completely unshielded basses ever did.
If anyone has any advice to track down the grounding problem, I'm all ears. I'm going to open it back up tonight and make sure none of the circuit boards are touching the copper shielding.
Other than the buzzing, the pickups sound fantastic and I'm very, very happy I made the switch!
Michael
