"Best" Neck 'Mudbucker' pickup for P-Bass

[BassApprentice]

Afternoon all,

Following on from dood (who followed on from me) what type of pickups have people used right at the end of the neck? (see picture) I use "best" lightly, I really just want to know what pickups people have used in the that position.

Initially I wanted to use one of the big DiMarzio pickups (a la Sheehan) on my bitsa-P bass but it seems that you have to wire your bass in stereo to get the best of them and since I'm not in a band or playing at high volume that's a bit of a faff. Also the reviews say the are quite limited tonally so maybe not the best.

So let me know what you think folks!

[PlungerModerno]

Couple of suggestions:

DiMarzio make a Billy Sheehan 'bucker for the Yamaha Basses he plays:
[url="http://www.dimarzio.com/pickups/bass/standard-bass/will-power-neck"]http://www.dimarzio.com/pickups/bass/standard-bass/will-power-neck[/url]
Similar to the Model one they make:
[url="http://www.dimarzio.com/pickups/bass/standard-bass/model-one"]http://www.dimarzio.com/pickups/bass/standard-bass/model-one[/url]

EMG, Bartolini and many others make humbuckers of various sizes. . . Depends what you want.

I'd also suggest the neck humbucker that Seymour Duncan makes for Ricks:
[url="http://www.seymourduncan.com/pickup/rickenbacker-humbucker-neck"]http://www.seymourduncan.com/pickup/rickenbacker-humbucker-neck[/url]
See it in use here: [url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vj7GOU239nk"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vj7GOU239nk[/url]

[Dood]

I'm investigating the opinion that the outputs need to be separate. I'm a fan of active electronics, so I'm thinking about getting the tone right from the bass first maybe with some sort of custom filtering and certainly active mixing rather than a passive pan pot (yuk).

As for the neck pickup, well, inside the casing of EMG pickup soapbars, they are all rail type, so that might be my way forward. You could stick a big fat MM pickup in the neck position and it wouldn't matter about string spacing. Even the passive EMG's, the HZ models are rails too if you didn't want to mess with active units. So I may test that theory.

My other current fave is definitely the Aguilar DCB soapbar, just a beautifully sweet sounding pickup. Not surprisingly my ear likes it as the EMG sized model is pretty much the same type as the EMG DC, a big fave of mine. i.e. dual rails. The Aguilar I think has the nicer tone between the two - sweeter, yeah, that's the right word - but the DC is great for cutting through as it has a nice peak in it's top end.

Mmmm decisions decisions!

As for the Will Power - well, I really love the Dimarzio P style pickup and I have a Will Power P model here to install at some point so maybe it'd be logical to get the matched pair. If someone had a set of pickups from the BB714BS model, with the neck rail pickup, i'd probably rip their arms off as a great donor pickup. I like rails.. rails are nice!