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The Official MTD USA Thread

#11,174
Bartolini 2J Squared quad coil pickups inbound today, will be A/B-ing them in my new 535 :)

These are different from Bartolini's previous quads in that they're configured with two split-coil, but inline pairs under each cover, rather than split and offset (think P, reverse P).

The proprietary MTD USA Barts use a low wound/low impedance reverse P configuration through a gain raising buffer, with no differentiation in wind between neck and bridge I believe. It'll be cool to see the difference between the two. The quads can also be run in parallel or series with all 4 coils per pickup at once, too. And yes, I'm doing at least some minor DAW/video documentation of the process and variation in tone between the stock ones and these.
 
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#11,176
DrGroovenstein said:
That sounds awesome, keep us posted. What’s your prediction about the change in tone?
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Have actually already made a video demoing the differences! I knew the 2Js would be more Jazz Bass like, but didn't expect that it would be the two rear-most in line coils that provided that. I thought it'd be the 2 neck coils, or both outside coils. Those options both sounded strange in terms of their comb filtering (2 forward coils didn't sound strange, just deeper and not as J bass like). I also demoed parallel mode. I'll post it soon!
 
#11,179
DrGroovenstein said:
WOw awesome. Not as huge a difference as I would have expected, but I really like the slap tone on the new pickups. The fingerstyle, I prefer the originals. Might differ depending on the music style/mix thought - new ones are very J like I guess.
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To me, the difference is very pronounced between all 3 examples, but then again I'm a tone nut, it's my own bass, and I've been playing and switching back and forth and have become quite attuned to those differences now!

I prefer the neck pickup to use the rear in-line coil, by far. The bridge I prefer either in parallel or with the rear in-line also. That's the "J" setup from the video - I didn't mess with mixing parallel and "single" wiring for the video (it would have been 10 mins long!). If you can listen with good headphones that aren't too bass-heavy or studio monitors and can play loudly, pay attention to the ultra high end and air/string noise zone differentiation between the original MTD barts and the 2Js both in-line. That's one place I hear a lot of difference. Then of course there's just the resonant peak and general tuning variation between them - the resonant peak in the originals sounds to me to be very high (and I believe they're related to the Classic Bass series, so that would make sense, plus they're low wound for a greater frequency response), while in the 2Js in in-line mode it's much lower and more characteristic of a J-Bass. But it raises again in parallel mode.

Anyway, I spend way too much time thinking about this stuff :)
 

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