Pickup noise on brand new MIA Fender Jazz

You need to define a "bunch" better. There is a certain amount of normal hiss with single coils especially soloed. Then, you need to look at what other electrical things are around you, especially things like fluorescent lights.

 

theres nothing you can do. its single coil hum. totally normal.

 

Electro-Harmonix HumDebugger pedal might help a little.

 

This is why Fender offers "Noiseless" pickups on some models. Why don't they put them on all models? Because many players prefer the tone of the Single Coil Jazz pups and they usually play them with both Volumes at max to eliminate the noise.

Like mdogs said above, the amount of noise will vary with the location and the surrounding electrical disturbances. Your tone knob can reduce it somewhat but it's just the "Nature of the Beast"
Rocky

 

That's your single coil pickup 60 cycle hum. My late 07 American standard jazz has the same pickups as yours and when I favor one pick up or the other there is a tiny little bit of hiss/hum. As soon as you start playing or in a mix you shouldn't notice it one bit. If you are around florescent lighting or other electrical sources, they can sometime cause a little extra noise. Depending on what "a BUNCH" really means to you, you probably don't have a problem. You may need to have the bass shielded or get noiseless (hum canceling) pickups but to me they take a way the "real" jazz bass sound.

 

The reason you're not hearing the noise when both pickups are on at full volume is that they are wired to act together as a humbucker when they're both up at full. If you lower one of them, the hum cancelling is no longer equal and the bass will hum.

As the others suggested, there's not really anything you can do other than to try and avoid playing close to electrical equipment and in areas where there's less electrical interference, but there will always be some degree of hum with single-coils.

There are a lot of hum-cancelling pickups on the market by a lot of different makers, and many of them sound really good, but none of them really sounds exactly like a true single-coil. Unfortunately, the tone comes with the noise - no extra charge!

 

If you lower both pups evenly they should cancel out when they match. That's another way to test whether or not what you hear is problem or characteristic .

 

Feature, greggster59! It's a feature!

 

Have you considered shielding the pickups? I bet it removes a large portion of your unwanted noise.