Testing pickup locations?

[Tsal]

Hi all,

Planning my first bass build, and got curious: do you often test the locations of the pickups before a build, or how do you determine where to put them?

I was considering taking a cheap bass, routing a big swimming pool between the neck and the bridge, and using velcro or something to temporarily locate pups and find out where the sweetspots would be

 

[Matt Liebenau]

That's one method. Someone here rigged up a jig to suspend the pickup over the strings and moved it to test pickup locations.

 

[wraub]

Some ideas here... Pickup / position testing setup

and, some info here- BuildYourGuitar.com :: Pickup Placement

 

[rudy4444]

Hi all,

Planning my first bass build, and got curious: do you often test the locations of the pickups before a build, or how do you determine where to put them?

I was considering taking a cheap bass, routing a big swimming pool between the neck and the bridge, and using velcro or something to temporarily locate pups and find out where the sweetspots would be

If you are using a tried-and-true standard design or scale length then this has been done countless times before, some of which has been done in high end labs by actual physicists and/or engineers.. Luckily, we can save ourselves the effort and use measurements that have already proven themselves for many years.

Other than general positioning you will not be able to discern small differences in pickup positioning, the magnetic aperture of the pickups paints a fairly wide swath for picking up the string movement.

 

[dwizum]

My personal take, which I am sure will cause heartburn for many people - I don't really believe in precise "sweet spots." Yes, it makes sense that grossly different locations will sound different, but I pretty much just eyeball it and stick to relatively-close-to-known-design locations. I don't understand the concept of a specific, precise sweet spot as defined by locations of harmonics, which seems to be the basis for a lot of pickup location logic, since that seems like a concept that clearly falls apart the instant you fret a note vs play an open string.

 

[ardgedee]

I was curious about pickup placement and mapped the places Leo Fender had put pickups.

Answer: Every possible location in the space 3/4" from the bridge and 3/4" from the 24th fret.

(caveats: Outlines are offset from center to make them easier to see. Locations were estimated quick'n'dirty from photos; they're not accurate, but there's so much overlap that for this argument accuracy doesn't matter much.)

So what I've concluded is that it's hard to go really wrong with pickup placement, as long as they're in the ballpark of what you're looking for tonally.

 

[chinjazz]

As per what was said above, it's been done several times as well as Leo Fender himself:

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If your going for a particular ball park sound the measurements are available.

I can see doing something like Leo's breadboard only if I was designing new pickups and going outside the box so to speak.

 

[Tsal]

Found an interesting video, he's testing nameless MM and jazz pups in different locations.

Looks like the pickup placement is more crucial if you go with a single pup. If you have two pups in the neck and bridge, you're probably going to get a typical "neck" and "bridge" sounds in some form.

 

[Matt Liebenau]

Pickup / position testing setup

 

[Arie X]

I just stuffed a full set of fender vintage 74 jazz pu's into a Ibanez Mikro. i wanted to keep the locations in "scale" so to speak with a j-bass. All of that got thrown out the window when I discovered that zero pole pieces would align under the strings that way due to the Mikro's neck taper and string spacing and so I had to angle them quite a bit. The thing sounds way more jazz bass than not, but pole piece alignment under the strings was the prime driver.