shoulderpet

Mine get changed once a month so I may well make use of this

Hi Am considering between these 3 pickups, If I start by saying what I don't like in a bass tone. A lot of times I have heard bands play and even in small gigs there is a tendency for the bass to be a little indistinct and lacking in bite or clarity, that is what I want to avoid and I like a little sting in the upper mid and treble frequencies, in addition to that I am not an amp fiddler and I tend to set everything flat and try to adjust the amp as little as possible so a pickup that has "baked in" bite and clarity to it would be the ideal. This is for a bass with a bridge pickup so I can add that in to add high end if a pickup delivers in the other areas The Split P looks like a solid choice and it looks badass too but it I have heard it is a bassy pickup, will it have the clarity and bite that I need? Model P is the most often recommended choice for an aggressive tone but I have heard the high end is somewhat rolled off, how rolled off is it? Will power middle, this is not often mentioned but the few times I have heard it mentioned people have said it is like the Model P but a little more aggressive Thanks

Oddly enough I was looking at getting away from the usual P/J setup as per one of my fairly recent threads however my want for a decent quality short or medium scale bass significantly narrowed my options, there were short scales with humbuckers but I really wanted something that would feel like an upgrade from the 200-300 quid basses that I have many of without costing me too much. So I brought a MIM Fender PJ Mustang bass, brought it with the intention of swapping out the J pickup for a split coil like a Model J but I was surprised to find that this is actually the best sounding P/J I have played and I think I will leave the pickups stock. The P pickup soloed is very nice sounding, fat but decently bright sounding and capable of sounding either fat and warm or bright and aggressive, I have heard this is the same P pickup Fender uses in their classic series 50's P bass. Both pickups on scoops the tone but also seems to up the treble also, a lot of P/J's become very quacky sounding with both pickups on but this sounds great lots of low end and plenty of treble with a nice dip in the mids, I suspect that with some tapewounds on this bass would sound absolutely thunderous. Pickups are definitely better than the MIM pickups I have encountered in the past Setup was decent and action is nice and low and if my technique was better I could easily drop it to be stupidly low, the hardware all feels solid , I may upgrade the tuners to Hipshot eventually but this is only because I feel the E strings on short scales benefit from a higher ratio machine head All in all pretty pleased with this Oh and this is Sonic blue btw, in person it is more an off white with a slight green tinge which does not show in pictured

Bargain at that price, I would buy it, you can pass it on and make a profit if you don't like it

Ok so I have managed to work the screw out, have tried different pickup screws from my toolbox but it seems the holes are not deep enough as they all get really tight, I could drill deeper holes but I really dont want to risk bodging it, if I could find some pickup screws that were a bit shorter (say 20-25mm length instead of 30-35mm) then I would be sorted....hmm off to Google

Sorry I should have been clearer, this is one of the MIM P/J Mustang basses that just use a standard size P bass pickup rather than the smaller traditional Mustang pickup

I posted my query on another forum and got the following response so judging by this it looks like you are bang on the money "I have seen video of the factory mounting pickups. It appeared that they don’t predrill holes, or not deep enough, for the pup screws and just drive them into the body with a power driver. So it is a matter of the screw holes not being deep enough and now when you try to lower the pickup, you are driving into solid wood and the screws don’t turn very easily."

Thanks for the replies, I have a screwdriver set arriving tomorrow as I think part of the problem is that my current screwdriver set has the correct size screw head but the screwdriver I am using is around 4" long plus the screw-head by about 1cm wide so I think it is hard with such a small screwdriver to get enough force to turn the screw so I will re try tomorrow when I have the bigger screwdriver set

I have recently acquired a lovely MIM Fender Mustang, however when I try and adjust the P pickup height the screws are really tight, I am nervous to try and adjust the pickup height as I dont want to strip the screw holes, any ideas on how I can loosen the pickup screws so I can adjust the pickup height? Thanks