bass pickups

[sepultura999]

Hey there. I was browsing on ebay about a week ago and some guy was selling a double guitar his friend made. One was a standard 6 string and another was a standard 6 string with a bass pickup. I have never seen anything around the lines of a standard 6 string with a bass pickup.

Would you get a clear tone out of this, or would it be faded or muffy? The guy stated it just gives a deeper tone but I dunno since this is the first time I've seen this. Thanks for the help!

-Jamie

[shakyhands]

What did the bass pickup look like? did it only have the four poles or was it a blade type pickup?

[Jon Bell]

You can put a bass guitar pickup on a guitar but the poles won't line up so some strings will be a different volume to others. This could give a "faded" sound to some strings.

I don't think it would give a deep tone rather it would sound similar to a standard guitar pickup. The main reason a bass has a deep tone is the strings are an octave lower (obviously ).

Edited October 4, 2004 by Jon Bell

[MartinP]

Cheers!

It's kinda interesting this topic popped up right now - I'm just planning to build a 8-stringer for one guy and was playing with the idea of using EMG's Extended Series bass pu's for that. Those EMG's all have blade polepieces, but different inner structures (some are J- some P-bass alikes, some have parallel coils and that's what I'll go with), so there shouldn't be any problems with the string spacing etc. What's interesting though is, that bass pickups seem to have a much higher resonant peak than guitar pu's. I'm aware it's not the single nor most critical measurement, but should give an overall indication of pu's nature, though. I mean, usually singlecoils have higher resonant peak than humbuckers, and we all know the sound difference between those two types.

Would be highly interesting to hear some comments from people who have actually tried bass pu's on guitar.

[jammy]

My 8 string has got EMG 45DC's on it, there the same as the EMG85, only longer.

[sepultura999]

What did the bass pickup look like? did it only have the four poles or was it a blade type pickup?

The pickup was a bass humbucker or jazz that was thick enough to mess my brain up to look like a humbucker lol...the picture was a distant shot on a funny angle so that's why. The cover was black, so you couldnt see any rails or coils.

-Jamie