New pickup day ! Kloppmann Day JB61 set with pics !

It's been a while since I've had to be convinced to change pickups, but I happened to go to a gig a year back and heard a really really really epic JB tone. The player was pretty good but the tone had a presence to it that was colored just right despite all the variables ( the bass, the amp etc ...)

I reached out to the Bass player to see if he was interested in coming in for some contract work at our recording studio where we compose for video games and some backing tracks. There was that tone again, I had to ask him and he had mentionned Kloppmanns with the 'they aren't cheap' added to it. I did some research, heard a great demo on Youtube and after going back and forth with Andreas my mind was set. They just came in and I'm going to put them through their pace on a new bass soon enough.

 

So a few weeks later and here's what I can report :

First a few things about me :

1 - I am not a believer usually in pickup swaps, there isn't a tone I usually can't get with just a bit of pup height adjustment and a pre-amp tweaking.

2 - I've been around long enough to know that a big part of tone is strings and technique, the rest is fancy cork-sniffing or amp-dressing ...

3 - Jazz Bass tone is Jazz Bass tone, the vast majority of JB type Basses I played sound the same, My main JB is a Sandberg California TT4 but I've recently sold my Power Jazz Bass that had a Piezo system so the pickups went on the Sandbery which already had a very good set of decent sounding Alnico 5 pups.

Conclusions ?

The Kloppmanns are colored, forget the 'transparent' woody characteristic of your typical Hi-Fi boutique pickups, these pickups are made to sound a certain way and it is a VERY pleasant tone because off the mark it is transformative, your bass didn't sound like this, it is obvious, and these pickups makes it sound very very different. It took me a while to get the height adjustment right but I am really happy with the end result. The tone is hard to describe and it may be a bit of a one trick pony but it's there, that vintage plonky gritty jazz bass tone, tried it with the 'Bass setting' of my Yamaha TH desktop amp and it was there, tried it on my Markbass amp and it was there, tried it on a few different tools and there it was.

It's different from Fender's recent batch of vintage style pickups as it stands very well in the mix with little assist, the best way I could describe it is PRESENT.

Ironically I feel these pickups won't serve well someone who wants to step back on the mix, a p-bass can't be beat to shape your rythm section, but move past the 6th fret with the Kloppmanns and they really set themselves apart from the Sandberg Alnico 5s.

So this is the first time I am really convinced by a set of pickups, happy it turned out ok, I still like the consistency of the Sandbergs so maybe these will go on another project down the line.