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Rickenbacker Bartolini Owners.....Bridge Mute Pup?

theevilplankton

theevilplankton

Jul 9, 2009
950
719
#1
I'm a long-term Rickenbacker owner, recently a convert to the Bartolini pickup conversion. I've replaced both my neck and bridge pups, and just love the new ones.

I've been reading about the pup that resides in the mute compartment......is there any benefit to this? Bass sounds great as is.....it's another £160+fitting......

Internet is a bit scant on the whole thing....Google Bartolini, and it only shows the neck and bridge pup replacement.....is the mute one a bit of a relic?

All ideas welcome!
 
#2
I have one but I've never used it in the bridge position of a Rick. It's in a Telebass right now and sounds good - nice output, full range tone, no noise. I imagine that close to the bridge it will sound very different.

If you're happy with how the Rick sounds now I'd leave it.
 
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#3
Some pics if you're interested, mine is the currently available 6JH model, it's a split-coil humcanceller.

IMG_20190707_000136600~2.jpg


IMG_20190707_000149235~3.jpg


IMG_20190707_000228190~2.jpg
 
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#5
Thanks guys. Appreciated.

This was the dilemma.....from what I've read, it does add a little bit more of a trebly bite.

However, that's a fair bit more ££/$$ for a bit of treble! As I mentioned, on the Bart website they only mention the neck and bridge replacements.....maybe not so much of a call for the mute.....unless they've discontinued it?

I can only find one place over here that lists it in stock......
 
#7
Bartolini had this pick up available back in the mid 70's. I replaced the neck and bridge pu's in my 75 4001 back in 1978 with Bartolini's and installed the Bart mute position p/u while I was at it. The fit and look was great, but it made little to no difference in the overall tone of the bass.

Since then I haven't installed Bartolini p/u's into any of the other 4001's that I've owned. Wish I had taken a picture of the bass after I had installed the barts but didn't (didn't own a camera back then).

TD
 
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#10
theevilplankton said:
I'm a long-term Rickenbacker owner, recently a convert to the Bartolini pickup conversion. I've replaced both my neck and bridge pups, and just love the new ones.

I've been reading about the pup that resides in the mute compartment......is there any benefit to this? Bass sounds great as is.....it's another £160+fitting......

Internet is a bit scant on the whole thing....Google Bartolini, and it only shows the neck and bridge pup replacement.....is the mute one a bit of a relic?

All ideas welcome!
Click to expand...

I tried bart pickups on Ricks, neck, bridge, mute, none of them did anything for me. Bart pickups are nice … but do not have any Rickenbacker tone in them at all

is use to take a Seymour Duncan neck jazz pickup and put it in the mute cavity on my 4003s5 basses

Picture%20035.jpg

Picture%20484.jpg
 
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#13
theevilplankton said:
How do you find it? Are you running the other 2 pups as Barts as well?
Click to expand...

Here's where I bought mine from, as it says they had to order it from Bartolini. I think it took 4-5 months. The picture on their site isn't right, it's much smaller as you can see above.
Bartolini 6JH Split Coil Pickup - Best Bass Gear

It works fine with other Bart pickups, from what I've read most people either added a control (mini switch or extra pot), or repurposed an existing pot, like changing the normal bridge pickup tone knob to a vol knob for the mute pickup. I don't know of anyone who hooked it to the stock pickup selector switch.
 
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#14
The "classic" approach for the Bart mute pickup in particular was to wire it together with the neck pickup in order to emulate the sparkle of the (then) stock toaster pickup which would have been lost when switching to their system.

I've got a dual coil super strat pickup in the mute cavity of my Rick which is controlled by a miniswitch (single coil/both coils/off) wired such that when in single coil mode it forms a parallel hum canceling pair to the bridge pickup. You'll sometimes find this referred to as the Cliff Burton mod (he ran a Gibson humbucker in the neck position, I opted for Rickenbacker's OEM humbucker, the HB-1).

The result is you get the quieter signal of a humbucker, but restore some of the high end content lost from the original single coil sound.

I love this mod and highly recommend it. I've had a recording engineer (after exploring all the different combinations of switches on the bass) remark that that single coil in the mute cavity sound was the "secret sauce" of what was making the bass sit in his mix perfectly.

If I was going to go the full Bart route I would absolutely include their mute pickup in there. No reason not to, IMO.
 
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#20
callofcthulhu said:
One thing to note is that the Bart pickup actually required routing out the cavity to make the pickup fit.

I believe this is the pickup I've got in my bass:
Super Distortion® S | DiMarzio

No additional routing was done. You won't need to remove the teeth, but it won't fit with the mute screws.
Click to expand...

Excellent, many thanks.

Did you wire in parallel to the neck pickup? What kind of tone does it give?

You're running it with neck and bridge Barts?

Would love some pics as well, please!
 

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