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Has Gretsch been lying to us for over a decade?

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#281
The G2220 was my first bass (lifetime six-stringer) and I loved everything about it. I have an SG with mini-humbuckers, which I love, so that was a part of the appeal of the G2220 to me, but mainly I chose it because of the reviews and the sound in online demos. I don't have a problem with hum on mine, but I play very quietly, and almost always DI. This whole thing is very weird, but I would have still bought the guitar if it had been advertised as having single coils. Really curious to see how this plays out.
 
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#282
i was an early complainer about the hum. i played the bass in a store, *loved* the way it played, thought it sounded great at polite volumes. got it home, and it hummed a lot. took it to a club, and it hummed like a mofo. took it back to the store, and they could make it hum, but they had to turn up the gain quite a bit. took it to a fender repair place, and it hummed just a damn little. pretty frustrating. but the short version of this is that i shielded everything, and the hum is nearly gone. it's *way* quieter than my mij jag with singles, and if i face my amp, it's dead quiet. so if you like the bass but hate the hum, this is a pretty easy option for fixing it.

i would hope that the answer to why gretsch is calling these humbuckers when they're actually singles is because their pickup supplier put one over on them. if someone orders 1,000 humbuckers for their employees to put in basses, and the pickups they get look just like the ones they've been putting in basses for years, who's going to check them? honestly, i wouldn't. i can see some supplier thinking they can make a buck by doing this. i don't see what gretsch/fender has to gain by misrepresenting what's in the bass. if someone buys one solely because it's got humbuckers but they discover it has a loud hum, they'll tell their friends it sucks and take it back. it would be a pretty dumb thing to do.
 
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#284
kevrex said:
i was an early complainer about the hum. i played the bass in a store, *loved* the way it played, thought it sounded great at polite volumes. got it home, and it hummed a lot. took it to a club, and it hummed like a mofo. took it back to the store, and they could make it hum, but they had to turn up the gain quite a bit. took it to a fender repair place, and it hummed just a damn little. pretty frustrating. but the short version of this is that i shielded everything, and the hum is nearly gone. it's *way* quieter than my mij jag with singles, and if i face my amp, it's dead quiet. so if you like the bass but hate the hum, this is a pretty easy option for fixing it.

i would hope that the answer to why gretsch is calling these humbuckers when they're actually singles is because their pickup supplier put one over on them. if someone orders 1,000 humbuckers for their employees to put in basses, and the pickups they get look just like the ones they've been putting in basses for years, who's going to check them? honestly, i wouldn't. i can see some supplier thinking they can make a buck by doing this. i don't see what gretsch/fender has to gain by misrepresenting what's in the bass. if someone buys one solely because it's got humbuckers but they discover it has a loud hum, they'll tell their friends it sucks and take it back. it would be a pretty dumb thing to do.
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I had it 4 days and someone knocked a guitar over into my bass and chipped a chunk out of the paint job. This rendered the possibility of return to 0. I did buy it expecting humbuckers..... That's why I'm aggravated and been digging into this quite a while. That's why I asked Kev1955. So there is multiple scenarios in which someone is stuck with this bass. Like if 2020 happened and it's too expensive to return, etc.

I've been planning on shielding like you said, and I'm also going to replace that switch. I dont like the pop when changing pickups.
 
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#285
This is for reference for everyone. I grabbed a few friends to get this done. @LowEndLobster you can use these if you need to. Remember everyone, this is showing us the magnetic field, and we should see some overlap of magnetic fields for it to be a humbucker (or in the split P's case hum-canceling).


This is a 6 string Ibanez dual HB guitar with a similar set up to a Les Paul. You can see the wraps around both coils.
6stringIbbyHB.jpeg


This is a P bass. You can see the split coils and how the field barely overlaps to give the P it's hum-canceling effect. Not a humbucker, but it gives that nice P tone we all love, and generally kicks the hum.
pbass.jpeg


This one is a SBMM Ray5 my brother owns. You can see the coils, and it seems that they may have wrapped the poles individually as this one is less an oval, and has peaks in between the pole pieces. The field is different. Interesting really.
SBMMray5.jpeg
 
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#287
I was on the verge to get this one. Went to GC. Tried one. I was not impressed from some reason. So, I got Rumblekat. I don't care what is in Rumblekat (NYC mini). It sounds right for me. Since, I am quite lazy to get a "paper", can someone check what is in Rumblekat? Thanks.
 
#288
Adagietto said:
To cancel hum, two single-coils need to be RWRP, i.e., reverse-wound, reverse-polarity. That means that one pickup needs to be wound in the reverse direction and have its magnet flipped.

My G2220 does not cancel hum in the middle position. In two-pickup single-coil guitars, it's common that one is RWRP, but not universal. In three-pickup guitars, like Strats, the middle pickup can be RWRP. This also is not universal.
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I think not only are they single coil’s they put two bridge pick ups in it so the hum never gets canceled
 
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#289
Lot of "Regardlees, they're still a bargain" talk.
However,
user362432 said:
I was on the verge to get this one. Went to GC. Tried one. I was not impressed from some reason. So, I got Rumblekat. I don't care what is in Rumblekat (NYC mini). It sounds right for me. Since, I am quite lazy to get a "paper", can someone check what is in Rumblekat? Thanks.
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The Mini- Humbucker is pretty much a hum cancelling single coil. They have the snap of a single coil without the 60 cycle hum.
Or so I've read.
 
#294
spatters said:
There are a lot of lawyers in this thread attempting to provide pro bono legal counsel to @LowEndLobster :roflmao: :roflmao: :roflmao:

I'm sure the man is quite capable of taking care of himself.

I'm also sure that there are some emails and/or Slack conversations flying back and forth at FMIC right now.

My two cents, from a business perspective (not a legal perspective):
  • Gretsch (FMIC) went to some trouble to have those pickups made: they're not, to my knowledge, shared by any other instrument.
  • The pickups are clearly intended to look like Filtertrons with a solid cover, and not like any known single coil pickup. (Jazz, P90, Strat)
  • Accordingly, while "fraud" is a strong word, I don't believe it's unwarranted.
The only question is: has FMIC always known the pickups were really single coils, or did their pickup supplier pull a switcheroo on them and they didn't notice? (Since the pickups are welded shut, it's plausible.)

However, from the point of view of the consumer, and the reputation of Gretsch/FMIC, this doesn't matter. $300 is cheap...but many basses at that price point or less that come with humbucking pickups that are actually humbucking, from major brands like Epiphone, Dean, and FMIC themselves via Jackson and Squier, as well as store/house brands like Mitchell and Glarry. (Every P pickup is a humbucker.) "But it only costs $300" is not a valid excuse, and it's a definite black eye for FMIC.

What would I do in FMIC's case? I'm not immediately sure. These basses have been sold with single-coils for a long time, there are a lot of them out there, and any effort to fix thousands upon thousands of them would be amazingly costly, even though it's clearly the right thing to do. (Not because humbucking pickups are expensive -- they probably cost Fender a couple bucks each -- but because retrofitting them is expensive.) These are the sort of questions that keep managers up at night!
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Yamaha TRBX30x is at a similar price with humbuckers, just to add another to that list.
 
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#295
blackat said:
OK. Dig this. For the Gretsch G2220 Junior Jet Bass, the Gretsch website calls them "Gretsch mini dual-coil bass humbucking pickups." They don't call them "humbuckers." Wondering if that made a difference, I did a search and found EMG sells a humbucking pick up that is a "Single coil pickup in a humbucker housing."


I'm not tech-savvy enough to know what that means, but does it explain things?
Click to expand...

What I have bolded is pretty much the description of a humbucker, and these pickups are not dual-coil, nor do they buck hum (because that is the whole point of the dual coil). So I don't think this is some sort of verbal sleight-of-hand. They're saying there are dual coils in there, and that is not correct.
 
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#296
Just out of curiosity, has anyone tried checking the mini-humbuckers on the Epiphone Viola/Rogue Violin basses? I'm wondering if this limited to just these Gretsch basses, or if this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Also another, more selfish curiosity, I wonder if these bridge pickups are RWRP from a Fender '51 pickup. If people start offloading/replacing these, then this might make a good bridge pickup for my Bronco :whistle:
 
#297
James Collins said:
How do I nominate this for the most ironic thread on the site?

A thread about how a guitar manufacturer should know better than to mislabel something then goes on to mislabel so many things in the process?
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It's clear that many people here don't understand there's a precise legal definition of "fraud" and it is not the same as "misleading" or "unintentionally incorrect." It's also clear that many people don't understand what libel is and think that the fact that these pickups are obviously not as advertised is evidence enough that libel has not been committed.

A C-level attorney would quickly destroy both of those arguments in a court of law. This is why it's never a good idea for a non-lawyer to represent their self in court.

But, this is not something that's going to rise to that level. It's something that Fender will fix on their website, claim they weren't aware of, issue a challenge to anyone who wants to sue them to bring it on (because no one has that kind of money except Fender) and probably send a cease-and-desist letter to both Lobster (for the video) and Talkbass (for this thread to be removed).
 
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#299
LBS-bass said:
It's something that Fender will fix on their website, claim they weren't aware of, issue a challenge to anyone who wants to sue them to bring it on (because no one has that kind of money except Fender) and probably send a cease-and-desist letter to both Lobster (for the video) and Talkbass (for this thread to be removed).
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I don't think it will rise to that level and it would be a mistake for them if it did. I bet they just ignore it. A C&D will just attract more publicity.
 
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#300
Snert said:
I don't think it will rise to that level and it would be a mistake for them if it did. I bet they just ignore it. A C&D will just attract more publicity.
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I don't think they have much to worry about when it comes to publicity over a $300 product that's a tiny little fraction of what they offer on their secondary label.

That's a gnat in the room that their lawyers will barely spend a minute discussing beyond the verbiage they're going to use to spin how this happened. You're basically talking about felling Goliath with a grain of sand. Ain't gonna happen.
 
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