Killed_by_Death

I had one for a weekend, received it late on a Friday arvo & immediately noticed the Walnut laminate neck was super-flimsy. Couldn't even tune down to D-Standard w/o it becoming nearly unplayable. So I drove the 100 miles to Guitar Center on Monday & returned it. That was the last time I purchased a Standard, but ironically I found a GIO (GSR100EX) that had the stiffest "1 piece" neck I've experienced. "1 piece", because it was a actually a neck with a noticeable joint in it between the 3rd & 5th frets. It's not uncommon, because I tried another GSR100EX neck & it had a joint at the exact same spot.

I thought the Nordstrands were also fatter than a MK1, but it looks like it's a little narrower: https://nordstrandaudio.com/collections/4-string-soapbar-bass-pickups/products/big-single-4 If you got the EMG size, all bets are off:

It's worse, the MK1 will be about 15mm longer, leaving a 7.5mm gap on each end:

Oops, we all forgot to mention the custom -fit for Big Singles in the MK1 spots. I doubt standard Big Singles will fit.

If you're not using the G-string (ha-ha), you could just use a 4-string tuned to Drop-C: CGCFA I had been tuning a 4-string BEAD, but yesterday I decided that C-Standard was low enough.

Start looking at the pre-owned market, I'll bet they'd be cheap-as-chips pre-owned. There was a Talman at the local pawn for only $100 USD & with a nice case. The Dynamix pickups are also in the GIO level of SoundGears, but the machine-heads on those are chintzy.

Back then Rollins band was playing all the small venues, even Fairfax High School gymnasium 😀 Kudos for spelling cojones correctly, I always laugh when folks spell it cajones, which means 'little drawers'. Tool was there as well, as they were up-&-coming at the time & had just done Lollapalooza II with RATM.

I'm not sure if the U.S. Bartolinis are like that, but the MK1 are embedded in epoxy, it's just a brick. I would imagine the BH2 are the same way.

We had a really good deal from Spotify: $5 USD/month for a year, first 3 months free which included Hulu's video-streaming service TBH we got it for the Hulu & thought 1 of us might use Spotify, but never did. That's a deal only available for students, so you need a EDU eMail addy & a copy of your current class schedule. Cut to the end of that year & I let it ride to see if they'd keep billing only $5, but it jumped to $10 w/o the student verification, & we lost Hulu. Good luck getting your money back from those bastards, you cannot get a human on the phone & AFAIK there's no way to get a refund. All-In, a year of Spotify+Hulu only cost us $45 USD, so not bad, but probably never again. Right now I'm on a Black Friday deal with Hulu, $2/month!

The only downside to the Big Singles is the noise, if you blend away from center. I don't think it would bother most, unless you're frequently soloing one pickup.

sort of related:

They are, they're also split-coil humbuckers >>MK1 disassembled<<

Plywoods are known as tone lattice worldwide, in every corner.

The trouble with single-coil pickups is that you can't install series/parallel switches to fill out the passive controls, so you should stick with the 3-band preamp scheme. However, you might be able to custom order Big Splits that have 4 wires, which could be switched. The downside is that you'd lose 33% of your output Power in parallel. Been thinking about asking the local luthier to rewire my Big Splits to parallel for that extra top-end that I'm missing from the Big Singles. If you have a soldering iron you can quickly bypass the preamp now just to get it working with the stock Bartolini pickups. Note that the MK1 Barts are split-coil humbuckers with only 2 wires.

That Load + Reload thing put me off of buying CDs. A new Music shop opened up in our area, so I nipped up there at the weekend & purchased about 10 CDs. The Load & Reload were the poorest of the lot. The standout in all my purchases was a Marylin Manson album, the one with Beautiful People. Haven't purchased a new CD since, but I have bought a handful of used ones in the local pawn shop.

I chose ZB, because they're the most Dynamic of the full-length coil humbuckers, & the switches fill out the controls. The Big Splits sound closer to single-coils, but they don't have a series/parallel option.

There are plenty of hardcore Metallica fans out there, they're the go-to songs after everyone gets drunk in the local pubs & the dance-cover bands are allowed some rope to play 'harder' stuff. One local player is an adamant defender of any & all things Metallica!

ZB just have a wide range of sounds, because of the series/parallel option, but if you want Aggressive single-coil sound the Big Singles simply cannot be beat. any dual-coil Nordstrand pickup would be good, & you could stay active & drop in a JC-3b Nordstrand pre-amp, which is: "3 band bass preamp with volume (pull passive), blend, treble (push/pull neck pickup - series down, parallel up), mids (1kHz down, pull up for 400Hz), bass (push/pull bridge pickup - series down, parallel up)" https://nordstrandaudio.com/collections/bass-preamps/products/3-band-preamps

If it were mine I'd go 100% Passive: Nordstrand Zen Blades Neck pickup Volume Bridge pickup Volume series/single/parallel switch for neck pickup series/single/parallel switch for bridge pickup bass-cut (instead of treble-cut) if you have another hole to fill, treble-cut (22 nanoFarad cap)

I saw Metallica on their first nationwide tour in a small bar near home, it was fan-bloody-tastic. Saw them in support of the Black album at the L.A. forum & it was crap on a stick in comparison, & the last time I saw a band in a large arena. I hung out in the small venues, like the Whisky, the Troubadour, & my fave of all was the Coconut Teaszer where you could mosh with local celebrities, like Henry Rollins.

The Warlock bass with the widow headstock is a nice touch!

That's some coincidence, I hadn't heard Blister in a very long time, but last night it was on Name that Tune, & of course it stick in my head for the rest of the evening.

There are potentially 3 ways to wire it that come up with even numbers: all series = 32 Ohms (each Ohms value summed) all parallel = 2 Ohms (the value of each driver divided by two, twice) series-parallel = same value as a single driver