What's the pickup with the most growl?

The Music Man StingRay comes to mind. Expensive or cheap they should give you the growl you need. If you don’t wanna mess with on-board preamp EQs you can always set everything flat, and the StingRay will still sound killer.

 

Someone should probably define GROWL, otherwise we may not all be commenting about the same thing.
Big Splits should have more upper-mids growl than anything Music-Man makes, but the Big Singles will have a little more.

 

I think growl is a multifaceted result of many nuanced construction choices, of which pickup type is one of.

 

Pickup goes rawr

 

I was going to say big singles, J blades have a lower focused growl, or MFD pickups.

 

Basses with two pickups have phase cancellation which is a big component of growl. Strings, playing style and pre-amp gain are also contributing factors. However, in the right hands, a P Bass with flats could certainly be growler than a Tobias Growler in the hands of an unskilled player.

 

Agreed- strings, set-up and technique are all major contributors to growl in my experience. Pickup height and type, electronics, etcetera. So many factors at play

 

Yeah, you should be able to get Big Splits to growl...with right strings, good setup, and technique!

what I learned can also help is a small cap in parallel with the pickups, although perhaps simply boosting high mids can help too...

 

No one defined growl, so here we are commenting abstractly.
TBH I think a single Big Split would have plenty of growl in the right position & the comb-filter of TWO pickups would actually be counterproductive to upper-mid growl.

 

Yes, among pickups I have heard and played, Nordstrands do also seem to me to have more growl than a lot of other pickups.

The "most growl" moniker used to belong to DiMarzio Model J pickups, but, now, by comparison, they sound like an irritated bobcat compared to the Nordstrands.

 

This pickup, I would think.

 

L2000 MFDs here's a clip of me playing with some friends. So much growl, however a lot of growl is in the fingers. In my opinion the key to growl is light gauge strings played hard fingerstyle towards the bridge.

 

Give an example of what growl is and we can advise you from there! Pick a song with exceptional growl, I can discuss growl all day!!

For me, growl is this:







But it might be something different for you!

 

A G&L SB-2. Nothing but growl.

 

I like the growl from my Ray34 when I crank the M and tweet the T and B.

 

An EMG reverse P and an EMG DC....Nothing growls like a Spector, Baby!

 

Check out the G&L MFD pickups.