customstocker Posted January 10, 2016 Posted January 10, 2016 Hi . I have a few Basses but would be a liar if I was to call myself a musician , I started playing bass about 8 years ago . . A lack of timing doesnt help me , terrible taste in music ...& limited free time, the latter , I'm sure is a common complaint .I customised a few basses myself & then out of the blue, a few years ago , I was bought into a stringed instrument project in Germany . The resident Luthier there's, heart wasn't in the project & the thing wasn't going to plan . my background is design based & I think I was their last resort. To cut a long story short , at a certain point in the project we needed a pickup which had an arched top face , this didn't seem to exist so I built a simple winder from a gutted overlocker sewing machine & made some units from all raw materials . as these were unconventional I made a replacement pup with the same materials for " Mike ", the German Luthier's, hand built strat , so we could test efficacy & actually hear the sound on something that he was willing to play .Mike is a great blues guitarist & the results were encouraging out of all expectations Iv'e continued on & off with the pups & am experimenting with multi-coils now . There are an awful lot of custom pickup builders out there already , but also plenty of blogs with players complaining about whats not out there in the way of after market stuff.... which , lets face it , goes against the whole point of custom building in the first place . my idea is to offer what's missing as well as standard stuff . Recently Iv'e been working with an electronics boffin in Poland & have developed an active unit with 3 filters for use with hand wound pups on a 1 or 2 pup bass . I have a cheap & nasty Jazz bass clone by Mensfeld , built in the 80's bought 2nd hand to test a pair of jazz pups that I wound . I routed off it's fingerboard last summer with the truss rod still inside , which was pretty scary ! & added a padauk fingerboard, this is 1 of the woods we used in Germany on the Violafon instrument as it gives a great sound on a fretless, god knows why it's not used more , maybe because of the colour . on this cheap beaten up jazz clone with the new electronics fitted & the padauk fingerboard it sounds alot better than the hundred quid it cost . see pic , thanks for reading . [attachment=209238:fretless jazz giffard brass probes kbks & swiss sights 002.JPG] Quote
TheGreek Posted January 10, 2016 Posted January 10, 2016 Martin?? Good to see you contributing to the forum. For those who don't know Martin, he builds (very good) custom pick ups to order - pretty sure he'll build you whatever you want to your spec. A friend of mine, Frank, bought a set for a jazz IIRC - he was very impressed though the pick ups went when he sold the bass. For those looking for a custom set of pick ups you should give these some consideration - I'm sure Martin would offer discount to BC members. Quote
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