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SGD Lutherie Pickups

  • Thread starter Thread starter CapeBass
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#821
kucor said:
Hi, I need some help with choosing pickups. I need set of soapbars in P2 size to wire with obp3, but am little confused with all this options, ND, Sidewinders, deep, narrow, wide...

sound I am searching for is all around for all types of modern music, which means pop, disco, but also jazz, funk...so I need lot of low end, but also nice highs for slap sound, and mid range for smoother music like latin jazz.

not really tending into vintage or rock...

some help would be appreciated

thanks
Click to expand...

For an all around pickup, go with the wide aperture ND3 neos. It works well in all styles of music.
 
#825
SGD Lutherie said:
Just to toot my own horn a minute:

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:D
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Toot away, David. You deserve it!

I LOVE my SGD wide-aperture Neo humbuckers! Got a set for each of my two Carvin Icon five-strings (one fretted, the other fretless). To quote the review:

The sound is big, warm, deep and powerful, with plenty of highs when you need them.
Click to expand...

Got that right! To which I would add only that, in addition to being big, warm, deep and powerful, the sound is also very clean. Hi-fi in the best possible sense, my SGD humbuckers are a superb match for the Audere 18-volt four-band onboard preamp, with three-way "Z" switch. (When you flip the switch into "Low-Z" mode, you'd better be sure you know what you're doing. It's like playing a pipe organ into a set of folded horns!) :eek:

Now THAT'S what I call bass! Me likey! :hyper:

MM
 
#826
VincentSalizeri said:
Hey SGD, last time I looked, your P-pup was dual humbuckers. Do you offer a P-pup that is just the standard split single-coil?
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I don't yet, but I have a neo P in the planning stages, so I'll probably be prototyping that this week.

What type of tone would you be looking for from a P?

I'm also working on some more traditional P & J style pickups. I do rewinds all the time, so I figured why not. Some will be pretty standard, and some quite a bit different on the inside. The prototypes are on the bench at the moment.
 
#827
MysticMichael said:
Got that right! To which I would add only that, in addition to being big, warm, deep and powerful, the sound is also very clean. Hi-fi in the best possible sense, my SGD humbuckers are a superb match for the Audere 18-volt four-band onboard preamp, with three-way "Z" switch. (When you flip the switch into "Low-Z" mode, you'd better be sure you know what you're doing. It's like playing a pipe organ into a set of folded horns!) :eek:
Click to expand...

Thanks Mike! Glad you like the pickups. You know we are so close I could have hand delivered them. lol

You made a good point about "hi-fi". That's what I was striving for with these pickups. I wanted to hear my bass, not the pickups. But some people think hi-fi means thin and sterile. But if you plug an old P bass into a hi-fi rig (think Alembic preamp, Crown power amp, etc.) you get a big warm ultra clean tone. But not thin and sterile.

Also the neo magnets really bring out the low end. Once I discovered that, I figured out how to build the pickup around the magnets.
 
#828
SGD Lutherie said:
I don't yet, but I have a neo P in the planning stages, so I'll probably be prototyping that this week.

What type of tone would you be looking for from a P?

I'm also working on some more traditional P & J style pickups. I do rewinds all the time, so I figured why not. Some will be pretty standard, and some quite a bit different on the inside. The prototypes are on the bench at the moment.
Click to expand...

Thanks. I've got a PJ that gets most of the play time. I like the hi-fi, full-range sound of neos. I think the dual humbucker P may be a bit too thick for my tastes. I also would like to try to get a more even volume lev between both pickups. Right now, the P is of course quite a bit louder than the J. I like the difference in tone, crisp J at the bridge and fat P in the mids. But I don't really want it to be too extreme.

So, really, what I'd like is a humcancelling J that still has something close to thing single-coil bit, maybe a bit of a bump in the upper mids, and a bit more volume than the standard bridge J. With the P, I'm going for a little fat and round, maybe a bit clearer than the standard P tone. Both of them with the hi-fi sound of neos.

Thanks for the help.
 
#829
SGD Lutherie said:
Just to toot my own horn a minute:

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:D
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Excellent.

I've now had a few months of rehearsals and gigs with the ND3-HB in The Monster (my custom Moser Arachnid Ultra bass), and I LOVE it!! It really sounds amazing. A HUGE improvement over the X2N-B I had in there before. It gives me the sound I had in my head - better tone, more sustain, even frequency response... just overall better sound. My next custom build will have one or two of these in it. :D

Thanks.

Cheers!
:bassist::bassist::bassist:
 
#830
SGD Lutherie said:
You made a good point about "hi-fi". That's what I was striving for with these pickups. I wanted to hear my bass, not the pickups. But some people think hi-fi means thin and sterile. But if you plug an old P bass into a hi-fi rig (think Alembic preamp, Crown power amp, etc.) you get a big warm ultra clean tone. But not thin and sterile.
Click to expand...

Yes, glad we see eye to eye about what is "hi-fi". For me it's to the point where I find it difficult to communicate on TalkBass - because I don't buy in to the stereotypical definition of "hi-fi" that seems so prevalent here. So I have to qualify my usage of "hi-fi" - and hope that the other person gets it. Or I have to avoid using the term altogether... :atoz:

MM
 
#831
MysticMichael said:
Yes, glad we see eye to eye about what is "hi-fi". For me it's to the point where I find it difficult to communicate on TalkBass - because I don't buy in to the stereotypical definition of "hi-fi" that seems so prevalent here. So I have to qualify my usage of "hi-fi" - and hope that the other person gets it. Or I have to avoid using the term altogether... :atoz:
Click to expand...

Right. People think the opposite of "hi-fi" is "vintage", which in itself is a misnomer, but really the opposite of hi-fi is a little tinny radio speaker. Or I guess these days tinny little lap top speakers. :)

No one listens to music, even vintage music, though low fidelity stereo systems. Why listen to your bass that way?

The whole vintage craze is silly because back then people though that was hi-fi. No one was making lo-fi bass pickups or amps. There is no vintage tone, just different tones. And I'm old enough to remember. lol
 
#836
12bass said:
Hmmm... perhaps David can address this one.

Although onboard buffers can help offset cable loading, I've found that they tend to add their own coloration to the sound that isn't necessarily desirable, IMO.
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I'd say generally they do not add coloration, but instead remove the coloration of the cable. If you use one with a high input impedance, say 1M, you will hear a brightening of the tone, and the resonant peak of the pickup will shift higher.

Thats the tone of an unloaded pickup. That's your uncolored tone. It's like taking a blanket off the pickup.

If you lower the input impedance down to around 200k, you won't hear this affect, and it will sound more passive.

This is the idea behind the Audere preamp.

This is assuming that the buffer has adequate fidelity of course. But they are very simple devices so they should.

Here's some clips from the old Redeemer thread. I did a blind A/B tests to see if anyone could tell which was the a JFET buffer, the Redeemer, and an EMG BTC set flat.

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You can hear how the passive clip sounds quite lifeless in comparison. Which one do you think is the JFET?
 
#837
Happy User Comment

David,
Got the sidewinders wired up vol/vol with 500K's to the EZQ and I am verry happy. 500K's and series wiring is definitely the way to go IMHO. Truly like no other pickup I have come across.

Cheers!
 
#840
Hi David,

Still diggin' your pickups. The Sidewinders turned my Ibanez into a real bass.

Now I'm looking to do the same with my backup bass, but maybe go in a different direction for some variety in the sound. What pickup set would you recommend for kind of a "Modernized Rickenbacker" flavor? Like this guy:

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Would your Neos go there? The bass is an Ibanez SR-535.

I understand lots of factors go into the final tone. I'm not trying to clone that guy's rig, just indicating the direction I want to go.

Thanks
 
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