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I have been reading about how Cliff Burton had his Rickenbacker bass modified by adding a SD HotStack in the cavity where the rubber mute is. Since I have never used the mute I figured I could live without it. Although much has been written about his bass there weren't any good demonstrations of what the pickup was used for and I seriously doubted that putting a pickup in that position would have enough string movement to be useful. Some people said it was just there to provide hum cancellation but I doubt that. So yesterday I taped a pickup across the top of the bridge to see if it would produce a usable tone and it did. All of the pickups I tried sounded pretty good but none would fit easily in that space.
Since I had a 6k Ceramic OEM Strat pickup I decided this would be the best candidate. I removed the poles and magnet from and routed out the center of the bobbin and glued a ceramic magnet in the middle to form a rail pickup. Then I wrapped the coil in aluminum flashing tape and grounded the shielding. Lastly I had to trim the bottom lip on the pickup to get it to match the dimensions of the metal baseplate for the mute and epoxied the pickup to the baseplate.
Instead of wiring the new mute/pickup to a push/pull I gave it a 250k volume pot and rewired the bass to use a single master tone. As expected a 6k pickup in that position is very bright and not all that loud but it is perfectly usable especially when used with the other positions on the 3-way switch. Having the mute/pickup on it's own volume acts a lot like a presence control and the middle/neck switch positions really shine in combination with it. Since the coil was well shielded and the bridge is grounded it doesn't hum much despite being a single coil.
Since I had a 6k Ceramic OEM Strat pickup I decided this would be the best candidate. I removed the poles and magnet from and routed out the center of the bobbin and glued a ceramic magnet in the middle to form a rail pickup. Then I wrapped the coil in aluminum flashing tape and grounded the shielding. Lastly I had to trim the bottom lip on the pickup to get it to match the dimensions of the metal baseplate for the mute and epoxied the pickup to the baseplate.
Instead of wiring the new mute/pickup to a push/pull I gave it a 250k volume pot and rewired the bass to use a single master tone. As expected a 6k pickup in that position is very bright and not all that loud but it is perfectly usable especially when used with the other positions on the 3-way switch. Having the mute/pickup on it's own volume acts a lot like a presence control and the middle/neck switch positions really shine in combination with it. Since the coil was well shielded and the bridge is grounded it doesn't hum much despite being a single coil.
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