Pickups for Fender Bass

End of the 90s I already was the local “pickup Guru” a few musicians in northern Germany. I had requests for repairing pickups for Bass-Players. One of them was Jürgen Attig, a the bass-player of a famous german Pop-Band called „Felix de Luxe“ (Taxi nach Paris).

Jürgen had and still has a nice collection of vintage Jazz-Bass Pickups. He had Jazz-bass Pickup pairs from almost every year beween 1960 and 1978. I was lucky that some of these were not working, this unlucky fact for Jürgen gave me the opportunity to analyze the whole collection. After having saved my findings I decided to add two JB-Sets to my product-line.

JB 61. The JB61 Set represents the early years production of the Jazz-Bass. It gives you this unreal deep pushing midrange punch that achieved it’s fans in most different styles of modern music: Flea, Red Hot Chili Peppers; Ladi Geisler (Bert Kämpfert Sound) or the unforgettable virtuoso Jaco Pastorius. More Jazz Bass-Lovers: The 16 yearold Bootsy Collins played a Jazz Bass with James Brown, not forgetting the fundamentals of legendary Rockbands like Noel Redding (Jimi Hendrix Experience) and John Paul Johns (Led Zeppelin)! Hear JB 61 in a Sandberg Bass:

JB 71. After Leo Fender had sold the company to CBS, they began saving wire. Similar to other models of the production like Strat or Tele, they began to reduce the windings on the Jazz-Bass Pickups as well, wich resulted in a tone with a different quality. The tone of the JB71 Set is a little lighter, with less of the fat low midrange than the JB61. The bass and treble frequencies seem to have a little more space and breath. Marcus Millers basssound is a nice example for the typical 70s JB sound.

PB 63.At the same time a friend of mine had an excellent 63’ Precision Bass. I again was lucky to have the chance to take a very close look at the pickups of this wonderful instrument. From this analysis I developed my PB63. This Pickup gives you legendary impressions of the P-Bass: a big punchy tone and the typical „buock“ by slapping the strings! A fundamental authority, just think of the famous bass-players, who made this instument so popular: almost all Motown-Hits were played by James Jamerson with his P-Bass and 90% of the old Stax-Hits are based on „Duck“ Dunn’s P-Bass sounds. I would even say that at least 40% of all classic world hits have a P-Bass in their bottom registers.

PB 57. Vor ca einem Jahr bekam ich einen 57er P-Bass Pickup zur Reparatur. Das sympathische bei einem defekten P-Bass Pickup ist, dass man das „Reparaturresultat“ schon genau kennt, da ja eine Spule meistens noch funktioniert! Die Spulen des PB57 sind historisch korrekt mit Formvar lackiertem Draht bewickelt. Die Unterschiede zum PB63: der Ton ist brillianter, feiner und etwas breiter!

PB55. Am Anfang war der Ur-Preci, der sogenannte Telecaster Bass! Dank Sting weiß wohl mittlerweile jeder Bassist, wie diese Legende aussieht und vor allem auch klingt. Der PB55 klingt nicht so fett, er ist eher „holzig und warm“ mit einem Schuss „bumb“. Einzigartig!