PhotographyNeodymium bass guitar pickups
For now, this project exists only in my mind. It's just a rough idea. I'm writing this down to help me brain storm about it.
For a long long time I've been pondering making my own bass guitar pickups. It's not because I don't like the sound of the pickups I play. Heck, I've been playing pretty expensive active pickups for most of my bass guitar days, so no complaints there. But, the trouble I'm often having is the uneven string-to-string consistency of the total sound. I want my bass guitar to sound a certain way (slightly rolled off lows, lots of midbass presence, midhighs cut, highs boosted a bit), but the fact that all separate strings have to have roughly the same volume doesn't always leave me enough freedom to shape the sound. It seems my disliking of string twang (the typical metallic sound of roundwound strings) is causing me all sorts of problems. On all my basses the pickups are setup in a slanted position so the higher pitched strings are closer to the pickup. This makes up for a large part of the loss of volume, but not nearly enough.
An approach I'd like to try is to build a classic "under-the-strings" type pickup, but with separate pickups for each string; a socalled "divided pickup". The separate signals are sent through a multicore cable to a mixer, which then enables you to fine-tune each string with its own volume, equalizer and compression (or even effects). The possibilities are almost endless with the Roland VM-3100 compact digital mixing desk I own. It'll be a hassle on stage, though. But once the tweaking is done, it should be possible to build a preset signal processor into the bass guitar and run a simple monaural signal cable to the amplifier rig.
I ordered a bunch of NIB (Neodymium Iron Boron) magnets, so I can do some experiments. Apart from the above scenario, I'd also like to try and build a truly balanced pickup to counteract the distortion inherent to the design of almost any magnetic (bass) guitar pickup, due to the fact that the pickup is located under the strings. I intend to make it a bridge type pickup that'll cover the strings completely and records string movement from opposite sides. If this works, I'm going a step further and try to build an optical pickup, much like the expensive Lightwave pickups, that pro bassists rave about. You don't need a lot of imagination to picture this as a divided pickup as well. It'll be one step closer to bass guitar tone heaven.
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