Pickups are essential components to creating the sound of a bass guitar. Their placement, construction and other factors can drastically change its tone.
Pickups play an essential part in shaping the sound of your bass guitar, from gritty power rock to shimmering funk. Let’s take a look at some of the most popular designs and why they work best with certain genres.
Magnetic Pickups
No matter the genre of bass guitar music you prefer – from gritty power rock to shimmering slap-style funk – pickups play an indispensable part in shaping the sound you create. Even if only interested in one or two categories (single-coil or humbucking), selecting between types can have significant effects on how your instrument sounds.
All magnetic bass pickups work basically the same: a wound coil is enclosed within a magnet, and when strings vibrate near it, its magnetic field changes, producing an electrical current in its coil that mirrors this vibration of steel guitar strings. That signal then travels to your amplifier where it can be transformed into music you play.
Pickup design, pole spacing and magnet type all impact how a pickup will sound. Single-coil pickups are most often seen, as they use one coil of wire to wrap around one magnet or set of magnetic pole pieces – providing a crisp sound suitable for Fender Strat and Telecaster instruments. Magnet type also plays a significant role; Alnico II magnets produce rich bass-treble frequencies for an ideal sound experience.
Piezo pickups are less prevalent on electric bass guitars, yet can still be found on some acoustic basses. Piezo pickups don’t use magnets; instead they sense actual vibration of strings through contact with metal points on bridges. While this makes them ideal for acoustic basses, without proper pre-amping they may sound flat and lifeless.
Current generated in coils varies with the strength, frequency and overall characteristics of vibrating strings, reflecting their strength, frequency and character directly in an electrical signal resulting from their vibrations that is then amplified to create bass guitar sound.
Removing bass guitar pickups can be complex and technical work; therefore it is best left in the hands of an experienced professional. They know which parts should be installed without risking internal wiring or electronics damage to your instrument.
Single-Coil Pickups
A bass guitar’s pickups have a significant sonic influence. While the exact tone you achieve depends on multiple variables – from amp to fuzz pedal and more – its presence or absence has an enormous bearing on its sound quality and tone. One key influencer on that sound quality is type of pickup chosen.
Single-coil and humbucking designs are two of the most commonly chosen bass guitar pickup types, both featuring exposed pole pieces for brighter tones that often serve country and punk rock players, respectively. Meanwhile, humbuckers produce fuller sounds more commonly preferred by jazz bassists.
Both single-coil pickups and double-coil pickups can produce amazing tones, each one has their own set of advantages and disadvantages. Single-coil pickups can be susceptible to feedback caused by interference from electronic devices around them picking up on exposed pole pieces that pick up signals, leading to feedback shrieks when you increase gain on an amp – although this might be beneficial when creating controlled feedback wails, it might not be ideal in live settings where others might be disturbed by your playing volume.
However, there are ways to mitigate noise. You could try using a shielded pickguard, which can reduce external interference on your signal. Or switch in different bass guitar pickups; ceramic pickups might be better suited to heavier styles of music like hard rock and metal as they’re more resistant to feedback.
Split coil humbucking bass guitar pickups not only filter out noise from entering your signal, but they can also eliminate the 60Hz cycle hum caused by traditional single-coil pickups. They do this by connecting two single-coil pickups together with their magnets in opposite polarities to eliminate this effect and deliver fatter sounds with enhanced midrange clarity and top end frequencies for greater gain capacity. It is a popular pick among bassists looking for balanced yet full-sounding tones.
Humbucking Pickups
No matter your musical genre – be it slap-style funk, gritty power rock, or acoustic jazz – bass guitar pickups are integral in creating the distinctive sound that defines it. Pickups act as electromagnets which amplifies vibrations in your strings into an electrical signal which feeds into your amplifier; their type and placement determine how and where vibrations are amplified, creating different tones depending on what they amplified.
There are three main types of bass pickups, such as single-coil, split coil and double coil (known as “humbucking”) models. Single coil models tend to produce an almost noiseless tone while providing crisp clarity – however they may pick up interference from 60Hz cycle hum, radio waves or electronics such as computers or fluorescent lighting that could compromise this result.
As such, many bassists opt for humbucking pickups, which are designed to cancel out background noise. Humbucking pickups consist of two single coil pickups wired together with opposite polarity coils so as to form a magnetic field and therefore cancel out ambient noise, providing a balanced tone with no sharp edge or harsh sound.
Some bassists opt to combine one humbucking pickup and one single-coil pickup in order to achieve a balanced tone that complements their music genre and style of playing. For instance, using neck humbuckers and bridge single-coils allows for deep, mellow sounds suitable for jazz or reggae music while more powerful combinations of front and rear bass pickups produce punchier, aggressive sounds suitable for rock or metal music genres.
Change Your Bass Pickups Properly (Find A Pro Database) Changing bass pickups is often a complex task that should be undertaken under expert advice to protect both your instrument and performance goals. Experienced professionals know exactly how to identify and remove existing pickups while installing the new ones properly for flawless performance – you may even get advice on which pickups would best meet these objectives! To locate one in your local area you can search Find A Pro’s database database.
Split-Coil Pickups
Your choice of pickups makes an enormous difference to the sound produced by your bass guitar. Some players favor one type over the other – others even employ both types in one instrument with either split-coils in the neck position and regular size humbuckers (or “quadrail” pickups, which combine four coils for maximum output) in bridge.
At the core of it all lies your bass’s magnetic structure: how its pickups produce signal. A single-coil design, typically seen on modern electric basses, works by sending magnetic fields through strings which generate interference waves picked up by coil and converted to electrical signals; these electrical signals then go on to an amplifier for amplification into sound waves.
However, this system isn’t perfect; interference from other guitar pickups’ magnetic fields can disrupt the signal. To reduce interference and keep playing as usual, an effective solution exists: split coil. A split-coil works by sending some of your signal through another coil before being switched back onto your amp and filtered to remove unwanted frequencies.
These pickups can be found on many Fender Jazz Basses as well as most basses manufactured by other companies, with Fender Jazz Basses often favoring them due to their superb balance between low end and mids frequencies and full sound without becoming boomy. Furthermore, these versatile pick ups can fit seamlessly with many genres of music including slap bass, rock n roll and metal music styles.
J bass pickups offer another variation on this design with two independent coils that are closer together and have distinct polarities and directions of coil wraps to cancel out mains hum. Heavy metal guitarist Dimebag Darrell often utilizes it due to its combination of power and clarity without becoming overwhelming.