Ever wonder why your Bass sounds flat and toneless? It could be the body material of your bass, but is more likely the pickups in your bass. The solution? Seymour Duncan’s basslines pickups.
All of their basslines pickups are hand made in Santa Barbara, California. This I would believe, based on the quality of their SPB-3 P-Bass pickups that I recently bought.
Installing these pickups was a breeze and took less then 20 mins. All I had to do was unscrew the old pickups, unsolder them, solder in the Basslines pickups, and then screw them in. The soldering can be a bit tricky, but is by no means a daunting task.
My first impression was wow! I play out of a Ashdown Mag 300 2×10″ Bass Combo, so I already had a killer amp to play out of and figured pickups could make a decent difference, but that was a gross under calculation.
The first thing I noticed was that the tone nob actually did something now. Before there was almost no difference from full on, to full off, but now we are talking from sharp tone bite to smooth full round sound. Here is a couple sound recording I did to showcase it’s range and a picture of the waveform so you can see the actual difference in shape.
As you can see the waveform is drastically different between the 3 examples. The 3rd example was my personal favorite setting which is a little less than %50 on the tone nob.
These pickups only cost around $65.00 and will take your bass to a whole new level. I recommend them for any musician that is interested in experiment with some new sounds and bringing out that low-end tone.
The example recordings sound good, but to really show off these pickups I’ll share this track that I recently produced to give you a idea of how these pickups sound with a band.
Disclaimer:The State of Affairs received no direct compensation for writing this article and is in no way directly affiliated with Seymour Duncan
Cool review – probably will go for this one
sound clips were good but last one ‘CR Given’
doesnt seem to be working?
Thanks Jack, yep that is a broken link, I think I still have that sound file around here some where. I’ll go find it and repair the link.
The tonal range of these pickups really is quite amazing. They may not be huge active humbuckers, but they definitely have the tone and quality any bassist is looking for.
[...] be noisy and unclean sounding. Kind of like a low bit rate mp3. Swapping the stock ones out for a quality set of bass pickups or guitar pickups will make the world of a difference. A set of pickups can cost between $70 and [...]