Question(s) about pickup placement

[BlueTalon]

I have been considering customizing one of my current basses or getting a custom body and going from there. On Warmoth's website, they have options for bridge, neck, and sweet-spot pickup routings.

First of all, what precisely is a "sweet spot"? Does it have anything to do with harmonics?

Which leads to the next question, are there optimal neck and bridge positions? Or does it matter where exactly the pickups are located? Is there any possibility of phase cancellation?

 

[testing1two]

Sweet spot is really just marketing speak. There are harmonic nodes along the string's path where certain harmonics are emphasized (here's a chart: Guitar harmonics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia). But those harmonics shift every time you change notes so trying to place a pickup based on these nodes will work well for some notes and not so well for others. In reality "sweet spot" positioning is really just going for the EBMM Stingray placement give or take a few millimeters.

So "optimal" pickup placement is completely subjective. Various basses have pickups in all sorts of different locations from the end of the fingerboard to within 1/4" of the bridge. And when you talk about phase cancellation, it's always present when two pickups are on at the same time. It's a natural byproduct of two transducers picking up the same vibration at different points along the string path. So the choice of pickups and where the pickups are positioned along the string permanently influence the tonal character of the bass. It's why a jazz bass sounds like a jazz bass and a Ken Smith sounds like a Ken Smith, etc.

 

[BlueTalon]

Thank you! That makes a lot of sense.