Shop owner “Would you like your bass with or without hummers?”
Me “is that a question?”
Shop owner “Would you like your bass with or without hummers?”
Me “is that a question?”
Hummer - Someone who doesn’t know the lyrics.
The reason for this is that those have a distinctive sound that the others you mention do not. Calling a P pickup a “humbucker” is technically correct in that it is hum canceling but very wrong in actual usage if you want the other person to understand what you mean.
But calling soapbars humbuckers is also incorrect because you can put any sort of pickup in a soapbar housing. ESP Streams look like dual humbuckers but are mostly PJs in actuality for example.
But I do agree with you, people widely misuse the term and I have to go along with that to be understood.
Calling single coil or P/J soapbars “humbuckers” is indeed just as wrong as calling anything else that is not a dual coil humbucker a humbucker.
If you want to get deep nitpicky, Humbucker was a specific trademarked term from Gibson describing the dual coil design; at the time, Gretsch had simultaneously invented the same thing and called it the “Filter’Tron”. The PAF terminology for a specific type of humbucker style in fact stands for “Patent Applied For,” as Gibson was seeking to patent them to stifle competition.
Anyway, IMO calling anything that is not a dual coil standard humbucker a humbucker is misleading, since the other pickups all have different types of distinctive tones of their own, different from the characteristics of dual coils.
A term you often see used instead for them is “hum canceling” or “noise canceling”, which is much more accurate.
A problem with calling them hum or noise cancelling is many aren’t. Like the Fender Noiseless Jazz pickups aren’t in fact noiseless. Would that vendors have to live up to their marketing.
Yeah but that’s just a quality problem
It’s Fender. You can buy better but you can’t pay more.
That’s EXACTLY what we Motorolans said about ourselves.
Chris Galvin, son of the founder, and last CEO who led the mothership to the bottom of the ocean, emailed all 100K Motorolans that he would fire any Motorolan he saw using a non-Motorola cell phone (there were a LOT of them around HQ). I managed the Motorola Univesity consulting group clients in Asia and Europe and didn’t even keep an office in the tower, so of course I owned and used a Nokia.
I think he meant the note stickers on the fretboard?
Ah yeah, missed those
I was contemplating getting black hardware for my Stingray 5 but EBMM pricing is $81NZ per tuning key and bushing then I need export freight as well.
I’ll mull on it
These will be great for you
I hope the pickups are better than their email coding.
I bought a set a Fender Pure Vintage 70’s tuners to go on my Squier CV 70’s P bass. I think they are worse than the stock tuners. Turning them feels like I’m trying to open a can of beans with a cheap can opener. So, I have a set of Gotoh tuners on the way. $20 less than the Fender set. Hopefully they work well. This is the last upgrade this bass should need.
So I finally found some time to replace the pickups in the Squier Classic Vibe 70’s P-Bass. I made a comparison of the two and here it is. Bass was plugged into the DAI directly with the bass controls at 100%. Nothing else was added, just a raw signal.
Thoughts?
Thoughts
I like both!
The Squier is smoother, the Fralin is more dirty.
My first emotion was: keep the Squier .
But the Fralin has a lot going on, it’s a more complex tone … I like!
And you can always tame it with the tone knob, if necessary!
EDIT Maybe post a sample with tone knob (cut) on 0% too?