I don't care what the general public can tell a difference or cares about. I play for me, first and foremost.
Same. But my most used setting on my Rickenbackers is with the bridge pickup solo'd, which to me sounds a lot more like a P-bass with a bit more high midrange content than it does like a Jazz.
The slab body is only a problem if you play with your right arm in a chicken wing position. Move your elbow forward and the body edges are no longer a problem at all.
That said, the 4004 basses and the 4003S both have contoured body edges.
Exactly. The setting on both of them that makes them hard to tell apart is with both pickups all the way up.
But in my experience, that's the only setting in which they sound alike. In every other setting they have, they each sound completely different. This is primarily due to pickup position.
Then of course there's the issue of which pickups you're comparing. Both Fender and Rickenbacker have put a variety of different pickups in their basses over the years. With Fender, at least we're only discussing one model of bass, and I think we all are agreed on which configuration of Jazz Bass we're discussing (the one with two single coils), but even there, the exact specs of Fender single coil pickups has varied over the decades since the Jazz first came out. With Rickenbacker, that's a whole company, and they've produced several different basses with a few different kinds of pickups. The earliest being the single horseshoe pickup in the model 4000, followed by adding a toaster top single coil pickup in the neck position for the upgraded model, the 4001. This changed over to two high-gain single coils (though the output of these has varied a lot over the years) that still come as standard on the 4003 and 4003S. However, there was also the 4005 bass, which at first used two toaster-top pickups, and then two high gain pickups, albeit in drastically different positions from the 4001. Then there was the 4002 bass, which used two humbucking pickups (of a side by side design) in approximately the same positions as a Fender Jazz. Additionally, there was the short lived 3000 series, which also had humbuckers, IIRC. Then there was the 2000 series, which again had humbuckers. And the currently made 4004 basses, which also have humbuckers (but of a different design than the 4002; Rickenbacker has made a couple different designs of humbucking pickups). Then there are the basses with the reissue horseshoe pickup and toaster pickup, which are a bit different than the originals.
So you kind of have to be specific about which Fender you're comparing to which Rickenbacker.
Both are set to both pickups, the most similar setting.
I don't think fingerstyle versus pick sounds nearly as different as most people on TB seem to believe. I use both, and get about the same sound.
Maybe if one of them is a series switch.
I don't agree about the bridge pickup on a Jazz sounding like a Rickenbacker. Sounds nothing like it to me, and uniquely "bridge pickup on a Jazz."
Rickenbacker. I like how the neck doesn't taper that much compared to most basses.
That's a unique approach I'd never heard of or thought of before. Cool idea!
