After setup, bass has infinite sustain

Gear
21

Somehow the first two images are in there twice! Not sure what happened there …

4 pics - one of each pickup, one showing height of G string at 12th fret and another it’s height at the 24th fret

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Don’t worry, that’s what we’re here for :slightly_smiling_face:

Yeah, but if they raised the strings, it wouldn’t play better or easier. More like the opposite, I’d say.

Mine too. If that’s it, it can be fixed easily.

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23

String height is fine. Almost optimal in fact, in my opinion - mine are usually around 2mm@12th, 2.5 is not bad at all. I would say try raising the pickups. You can easily do this yourself - it tells how in the manual. Just turn all screws the same amount at a time to raise them evenly, and only turn it a little at a time. Then check the tone and raise a little more, until happy.

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24

Thanks, I’ll give this a go

25

Ok, back with a good sounding bass again! Huge thanks to DaveT, howard, Mike_NL and JT for taking the time to read this and reply and for helping me fix things

Took a while because the pickups seemed to be as high as they would go, and I wasn’t keen to try lowering the strings. Unscrewing the screws more just made the pickups loose - not exactly ideal, but did allow me to test the sound and see we were on the right track

What I ended up doing was loosening the strings, removing the pickup screws entirely, lifting each side of the pickup out as best I could and inserting a small square of anti-static foam beneath the existing foam backing. This allowed me to raise the height the extra mm or so needed

For anyone like me who’s new to this and interested, here’s my understanding of why pickup height makes a difference:
Too high, and the magnets in the pickups have too much “pull” on the strings, especially the fatter strings, which messes badly with tuning and sound
Too low, and they’re too far away to mimic the string oscillations accurately and the signal they provide is faint. This means we loose tone and gain etc needs to be turned up to amplify the weak signal

Thanks again for everyone’s help, hope you all have a fantastic evening

11 Likes