Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

Chasing tone by buying replacement pickups is expensive and frequently not all that effective. Before you do any more of that I'd exhaust the possibilities of working on your technique, trying other strings, and seeing if your rig could be set up differently to get what you want. The basic voice of the pickups will never really change due to the fixed positions, so while you can open the tone up or go for something a bit hotter and darker I think pickups are not where it's at for finding whatever fretless tone is in your head. Also never forget this: you have two pickups and changing which one is dominant or how the tone knobs are set can make huge changes. If you're going after that burp-y Jaco thing, most Rics are a bit warmer than that altogether due to the pickup placement, but you're best off favoring the bridge pickup and messing with your amp EQ.

I say all this as someone who has replaced pickups approximately a million-jillion times at this point in my life as a bass player, and looking back a lot of it was a big waste of time and in a few cases I lost money on what I ultimately sold (I did break even a lot, though, so it's not that bad). Some pickups truly are special like the 4002 pickups, and the Toasters certainly have a unique charm all their own, but beyond that it just gets too expensive for the crapshoot when so often you will prefer the way things were before. If you do try HB-1s, consider running them as RWRP single coils instead of series humbuckers as this really changes their character. Better yet try a series-parallel-single coil switch with them.

HB-2s don't mount the same way so they'd be hard to try out in your 4001.

cassius987 wrote:...finding whatever fretless tone is in your head.

This is the key issue. What are you seeking, tonally? Can you give us some examples of the sound you are trying to achieve?

To further explain what I'm saying I uploaded one of my old (now broken up) band's recordings; one is a live setting and the other is a demo made in the guitarist's basement. The song, "American Kids" can be heard as the second song in the set of the live recording (around 4:40). The basses and rigs are the same: my 4003FL through my fEARful 15/6 with a TC Classic 450 head, and I'm sure the preamp was set pretty much the same. I think I used an Aphex Punch Factory in front of the head both times too. The differences: at the gig, I'm soloing the bridge pickup and the strings are Circle K rounds. In the studio, it's Fender 9050s and I'm using the neck pickup exclusively. The tones are vast oceans apart from each other. The pickups themselves, by the way, are the same.

https://soundcloud.com/cassius987/midni ... t-gig-ever

https://soundcloud.com/cassius987/midni ... rican-kids

Very different indeed,those 2 bass tones,from pure clankiness to dubby smoothness,cool songs,too!

Joshua, nice example of a sometimes difficult concept to grasp. Like the tunes.. I am partial to the live version... but then again I AM a sucker for live performances!

Thanks Woody and Tom. I am also partial to the live version. I think I'm just a sucker for the energy captured from a live performance, especially in the case of a song like that. On the other hand I am super happy with the tone I got in the studio basement.