Looking to get into guitar modding.

VomitHatSteve

Hat STYLE. Not contents.
I have a Rondo shortscale jazz bass, and I'd like to add another pickup to pick up just the E string.
Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I should go about this?
What type of pickup would work well for this? Where would be a good place to buy it?
Are there any decent tutorials for adding pickups?

Thanks.
 
I'd be tempted to wind my own if it's just one string. Just get a round magnet and wind a whole bunch of 42-gauge wire around it. I've seen people rig up pickup winders using record players, and it would be that much easier with one round polepiece.

Or I guess you could put something like a strat or dano pickup sideways, so it's just under the E. Just curious, though, what's the point of adding a pickup for just one string?
 
I'd be tempted to wind my own if it's just one string. Just get a round magnet and wind a whole bunch of 42-gauge wire around it. I've seen people rig up pickup winders using record players, and it would be that much easier with one round polepiece.

Or I guess you could put something like a strat or dano pickup sideways, so it's just under the E. Just curious, though, what's the point of adding a pickup for just one string?

I could see some pretty cool stuff out of a 1 string pickup, though I'd guess that you're probably still going to get some residuals from the A string.

If you added a pickup to one string and added new knobs and jack you could run it through a wah pedal to another amp! Oh la la!
 
Read through a book on electric guitar construction and another on repair. Stew-Mac would be a good source for that. Plan through what you're going to do and how you're going to do it before beginning.

http://www.stewmac.com/shop/Books,_plans.html

Buggering up cheap guitars is a great hobby. Go for it.

I suspect that your one string pickup will be less satisfying than you imagine but do it anyway.
 
Just curious, though, what's the point of adding a pickup for just one string?

I've actually got it strung up with three guitar strings (E-A-D) and the one bass string. I use it for playing barre-chorded punk, but the bass E string comes through much quieter than the guitar strings.

Thanks for the suggestions everyone. I hadn't even considered building my own pickup! Woah!
 
Am i reading this correctly that you have guitar strings on a bass guitar but keeping the low E bass string on?So you got low E bass string,low E guitar string,A guitar string and D guitar string on a bass guitar? EEAD
Just curious
 
Am i reading this correctly that you have guitar strings on a bass guitar but keeping the low E bass string on?So you got low E bass string,low E guitar string,A guitar string and D guitar string on a bass guitar? EEAD
Just curious

Yeah, except I tune it to dropped D, so DDAD.

This way, I can form a crappy two-person punk band that sounds like a crappy three-person punk band!
 
That actually sounds like a cool idea. I've seen two-piece bands before, but the one I'm thinking of was either playing a bari or using an octave pedal; I forget which.

Another thing I was thinking of, if you didn't want one goofy-shaped pickup or didn't feel like making your own, is to take a regular pickup and remove the polepieces below all but that string. I think some of the old Gretsch guitars with the stereo pickups had something like this, but I'm not sure how the coils were situated in those. I don't know how much it would pick up the other strings, but I bet the focus would be on that one. Maybe somebody else with more experience can tell you if that'd work.
 
You can just take a regular pickup and mount it length-wise with one string instead of across all strings. I tried to do something like that before that was slanted to just pickup the E and A strings. I grew quickly bored with the endeavor.
 
You can just take a regular pickup and mount it length-wise with one string instead of across all strings. I tried to do something like that before that was slanted to just pickup the E and A strings. I grew quickly bored with the endeavor.
You can do that if you want,but your intonation would be fucked wit all the mags on one string.The important thing to keep in mind about this post is that Greg has nothing better to do with his time than fuck with people.
 
You can just take a regular pickup and mount it length-wise with one string instead of across all strings. I tried to do something like that before that was slanted to just pickup the E and A strings. I grew quickly bored with the endeavor.
You can do that if you want,but your intonation would be fucked with all the mags on one string.The important thing to keep in mind about this post is that Greg has nothing better to do with his time than fuck with people.
 
So I got a pickup built, (not sure if it will work or not. I just used plain (uncoated) copper wire. Is that right?)

The next stage is to carve space for it into the body of the instrument. Any recommendations for how that's done?
 
Good to see you're working on this. I don't know if totally uninsulated wire will work; I normally see wire with a thin coating of enamel or something like that. That may be what you've got, though; I don't know how different it looks. The point is the windings need to function as a coil, not just a big lump of copper. I'd test it out before hogging any wood off the bass; you can make a pretty simple jig out of cardboard that will hold the pickup upside-down above the string, so you can see if it is going to pick up the vibrations. Just wire it directly to a jack and see if it works.

As for how to remove the wood, if your pickup is round, you can probably just make a round hole with a forstner bit. Otherwise, you may want to use a router / template combo.
 
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