Pickup Recipe for Punch, Grind, and Growl

Ive had the best luck with that type sound via soapbar and P pups.

 

i like passive vintage-type P or J setups "unloaded", i.e., with 500k pots instead of 250ks, into slightly compressed, grindy rigs without horns.

 

Tim's older stuff was Musicman. Newer is Jazz.
Flea's BSSM was mostly Wal and Alembic.
Duff is a PJ configuration.
Rics and Explorers are muddy whatevers.

It's hard to get that all in one nice package, if you ask me. But your best bet for instant punch is having a series/parallel switch. Series mode can rev the growl up nicely.

The Flea/Old Tim stuff is best achieved with big fat humbuckers. I am noodling on a Sterling with a big fat Norstrand MM4.3 pickup and the tone is dead-nuts for old RATM by boosting the mid a little, cutting the treb, bass as needed. Low action, hard digging playing.
Start there and add preamps as needed.

 

Subscribing, as I want know the secret recipe

 

The East preamps are like a spice cabinet inside your bass, if you ask me.

Sweeping a mid frequency can get you whatever growl tone you want: bear, leopard, heck... EVEN SHEEP! It helps a lot.
Then being able to use passive tone on top of that means that you can dial up a mountain lion on PCP, but make it still soft enough to sound reasonable.
Pull the treble to slap some sense into the crowd.
Or shut it all off with the flick of a switch.

If you want crazy-silly amounts of output, use Status pickups and electronics. Those were so high output that the volume wouldn't go ALL the way down (and it wasn't a grounding issue). They are like EMGs on Mcgwire/Bonds sauce.

 

Humbucker in the bridge with coil splitting capabilities. P-style pickups in the neck. Versatile preamp, maybe even 4-bands or something with a variable mid control. Series/parallel switch & humbucker coil switch.

Tech21 RBI for the grind.

 

Rics are hardly muddy! If anything they often lack solid low end. They were the original bright sounding bass when everyone was using Fender Precisions.

Entwistle's Explorer was an Alembic.

I think the key to those tones is a hitting the strings hard and some overdrive.

Here's a good example of the classic Ric tone. (extra points if anyone knows who the artist is).

Rickenbacker

I got a similar sound with my neo jazz humbuckers, a pick, and some distortion:

Drum/Bass mix

 

Heres my thoughts. Do something with a MM/J setup. Probably Nords or Duncans.
Ive also seen that the Aguilar pre tends to grind more than others.

I owned a stock lakland 44-02 which is MM/J Barts w/ Bart Pre. then I played a used one at a GC back in the day that had duncans and the aguilar pre and was grind city.

 

Technically P bass pickups are single coils. None of the strings are sensed by more then one coil, so it doesn't have the high frequency cancelation of a standard humbucker.

It sounds the way it does intentionally, with the wide squat coils.

But listen to John Wetton with King Crimson. There is a very growly P bass.

 

Unrep.... you're right. it would be J/MM

 

I think the MECs are wired in parallel. Maybe a series switch would help?

The difference is in the wind and the location. Every pickup is different, but if you switch to one coil that is perfectly lined up with that 70s jazz pickup position, you can reasonably expect it to have some similar tonal qualities to a 70s Jazz bridge pickup.

Here's the idea for that setup: the humbucker is to emulate the Stingray sound (ala Flea), the coil switching allows for the jazz pickup (Timmy C & Dufff), and hopefully the preamp would allow enough versatility in conjunction with the pickups to emulate the Rics and Wals.

I'm not entirely familiar with the switching abilities on those quad coils (like Delano and Nordstrand), but I imagine that you might be able to split out coils to use like a P or Reverse P, and then you could use two coil-switching humbuckers and get a bit closer to a Ric tone.

 

Yes! I'm a big Mahavishnu fan too.

If you stick some Rototsounds on a P bass and play it like that, you will get that tone.

The stereotypical P bass tone is just that. Everyone thinks they are all dark and thumpy, but they aren't. A good example is Forget Me Nots by Patrice Rushen. That's a P bass. Most recordings from the 70's were P bass, and they had a variety of tones.

 

+1.

SS roundwounds on a P bass with a heavy hand is my personal favorite.