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jazz pickups aligned vertically

What would happen if you built your body out of this:

Guy with huge magnet.jpg
 
The Italia Modulo basses had this arrangement for a few years, though using lipsticks rather than jazz pickups. I've no idea what they sounded like, but I've seen at least one re-worked with a custom pickguard and a p-bass pickup, so perhaps it wasn't that great a success. The newer model has a single more conventional pickup.
 
I've been building basses with pickups in that configuration for many years. I'm using custom coils of my own design, one long oval coil per string, three 1/4" A5 rod magnets per coil. They work very well. Full, wide frequency range, exceptional clarity and sustain. There's no bleed over of harmonics or cancelling of treble. The four coils are alternating magnets, alternating windings, wired in series, so the group is a humbucker.

J-pickup coils, even with the covers removed, would be too wide for normal string spacing.

IMG_2585B.jpg
 
I've been building basses with pickups in that configuration for many years. I'm using custom coils of my own design, one long oval coil per string, three 1/4" A5 rod magnets per coil. They work very well. Full, wide frequency range, exceptional clarity and sustain. There's no bleed over of harmonics or cancelling of treble. The four coils are alternating magnets, alternating windings, wired in series, so the group is a humbucker.

J-pickup coils, even with the covers removed, would be too wide for normal string spacing.

View attachment 674389
If you cut the ears off it would work, they're .74" wide
 
I believe Tom Peterson from Cheap Trick had a couple of 12 string basses (4 string with dual octave strings) and which had separate pickups and tone controls for each string. They were not very long though - maybe an inch or so with just a few magnets. I like your idea for an experiment.

Maybe try the Nordstrand Mustang pickup. You could use split it to use half for two strings and would only have to buy two that way and the length would be less absurd. The stang pickup is probably narrower than a J also, so you might actually get them to fit.
 
This is like saying....
"A tack hammer will do the job perfectly so, clearly, a sledge hammer would do it amazingly well and a wrecking ball would do it.... like..... awesome!"

Not so. Using a sledge hammer on anything a tack hammer would work on would just make mess.

Now, if making a mess is what you're going for quit playing and use the wrecking ball. How about 3" string spacing and a Wal pickup for each string in the bridge position and jazz at the neck for each. I mean, you gotta have tonal options, right?