Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

In the late 90s I owned for a few months a mint 2nd-hand Mapleglo/Black trim 360 guitar that did not sound quite like one, meaning no Rick jangle! In addition it suffered from a serious pickup output mismatch, i.e. the neck pickup was much hotter than the bridge one.
Upon inspecting the electronics and the pickups, the reason why the guitar did not sound like it should became obvious to me: 1) no treble-pass capacitor, 2) an overwound neck p.u., and 3) the treble p.u. magnet was identical to the bass p.u. one, which is fundamentally wrong!
To cut a long story short, I fitted a .0047 cap, partially unwound the bass pickup to about 8.0 K, replaced the bass magnet with a slightly weaker one, and replaced the treble magnet with a much stronger one. Oh, and I also switched (on both pickups) the high E-string and the G-string polepieces so that even volume was obtained across the strings. Now my 360 was sounding right. I wonder why it left the factory sounding wrong in the first place...

Just curious - why would you assume it left the factory sounding like that? Isn't it possible that the previous owner(s) had messed with it?

Well, I could tell the pickups and the electronics on that 360 had not been tampered with in any way. Not to mention that by the late 80s RIC had definitely ceased fitting their guitars and basses with the treble-pass capacitor.