Position of Pickups

[Ten Four One]

Very cool. I've never seen a 1 pickup configuration like this. I wonder is one with a second pickup in the mid/bridge position?

Here's a clip of one in action. Tons of thuddy low mid, thankfully the rest of the band is happy to clear the low mid region for the bass to live.



And a full hour of the Gibson version (they did it first).



And another hour or so - he switches to a Warwick from time to time if you want to make a comparison. Oh and Jack's a fretless player.



And I quite like the sound of this bass, a single coil in the 24th fret position - for $1k their Shortbass seems like a steal. Nothing modern about this tone, but it's awesome.



BTW good tone on this song. Very clean, simple, modern.



I do think the world is having a nice retro moment though - bands like The Black Keys and Haim are showing that the vintage thing (live, no backing track) still works on festival/arena scale (though Haim's Calvin Harris collab seems to prove otherwise). Both strike me as being the kind of band you'd see at some of the better venues in NY without top 40 placement and over-production.

I think many will concede that the loudness wars of the 1990s removed the bass guitar from most modern mixes. Now, many musicians, engineers, and producers have grown to like that sound. Many studios replace a band's bass player with a midi bass or a quick take by a studio musician, which is then highly edited. Often these occur without the knowledge of the band.

It's the revenge of Fletcher & Munsen! It's not just recoding engineers who've fallen for this - it's guitarists & etc.. I've fought many a battle with a guitarist who thinks that pushing the "low" knob on his Marshall half stack makes him sound cool. Everyone thinks it's "bass" that makes a song cool - but not the "bass-ist". Whenever I run into a guiarist like that, I walk over to their amp & turn down the "bass" knob, and if they fight me, I just pack up & leave, letting them know they already have that part of the frequency spectrum covered without me.

 

[Ten Four One]

Epiphone's EB3 and EB0 basses are very affordable & have a pup in the neck position. The EB3 is has a sort of Jazz location bridge pickup, though I find that getting a good balance between them is really tough, with one being super deep and the other being super nasaly, and the blend position being somehow both super deep and super nasaly. For $320 though it could be worth playing with.

As I mentinoed before, the humbucker in the neck position is really a Gibson thing, so why not just go for the Gibson/Epiphone version.





Really nails that Jack Bruce tone though doesn't it:



Here's an EB-0 short scale. I find the short scale basses are even deeper sounding than their long scale equivalents.

 

[Blankandson]

Do the 'sit down' players adjust their position to compensate? I can play easier when seated and a lot of that is putting my bass right where it plays the best. I can't do that most of the time when standing and using the strap.