Pickups for Yamaha BB basses?

[tonyf]

All,

Been toying with replacing the pickups in my (original mk 1) Nathan East signature for a while now.

Had the bass for years and absolutely love it. It's a fabulous player, looks amazing, it's a got a wonderfully tight B string and all in all, a tone monster. Jokingly call it the "money shot" bass because it always delivers live or recorded.

If it's so good, why am I looking to change it? Well, to be honest, it's probably because I fancy a change more than anything. Probably nothing more than that. Just fancy experimenting a bit, been playing my four strings for ages now and probably just want something to push me back into playing the Nathan again. In my case, a bit of new kit always helps... ;-)

Going down the route of looking for suitable pickups, I've found real trouble with the shape. There's very few aftermarket options it seems. I think Bartolini do some BB series humbuckers but I'm not sure. Any ideas? I seem to remember someone talking about Andy at Wizard doing a custom set for a Yamaha. Could be my imagination though.

The upside of using the Barts (if I can get hold of them) is that the Nathan already has a Bartolini preamp in it so they'd match really well hopefully (I'd originally swapped this out because the default Yamaha preamp seemed to be soooooooooo hissy when I recorded with it).

Anyone else changed the pickups in their Yamahas?

T

[BottomE]

[quote name='tonyf' post='725052' date='Jan 26 2010, 12:43 PM']All,

Been toying with replacing the pickups in my (original mk 1) Nathan East signature for a while now.

Had the bass for years and absolutely love it. It's a fabulous player, looks amazing, it's a got a wonderfully tight B string and all in all, a tone monster. Jokingly call it the "money shot" bass because it always delivers live or recorded.

If it's so good, why am I looking to change it? Well, to be honest, it's probably because I fancy a change more than anything. Probably nothing more than that. Just fancy experimenting a bit, been playing my four strings for ages now and probably just want something to push me back into playing the Nathan again. In my case, a bit of new kit always helps... ;-)

Going down the route of looking for suitable pickups, I've found real trouble with the shape. There's very few aftermarket options it seems. I think Bartolini do some BB series humbuckers but I'm not sure. Any ideas? I seem to remember someone talking about Andy at Wizard doing a custom set for a Yamaha. Could be my imagination though.

The upside of using the Barts (if I can get hold of them) is that the Nathan already has a Bartolini preamp in it so they'd match really well hopefully (I'd originally swapped this out because the default Yamaha preamp seemed to be soooooooooo hissy when I recorded with it).

Anyone else changed the pickups in their Yamahas?

T[/quote]

I had a BB1100s - 80's model. The last thing i would want to do is change the PuPs as they are wonderful. The electrics in the earlier BB models are amazing . I understand fancying a change and all that. I changed the PuPs in one of my basses and instantly regretted it. Why not get a new bass instead?