The Fender Company, whose founder Leo Fender was the father of the electric bass, introduced its first short-scale bass in 1966. Tina Weymouth (Talking Heads Tom Tom Club) is regularly seen with her Höfner 500/1, as well as with Höfner 500/2 Club Basses (as in this picture). Paul McCartney still uses his iconic Höfner bass. This young bass player was, of course, none other than Paul McCartney, and the Beatles’ global fame from 1963 onwards catapulted the Höfner 500/1 right into the limelight. This bass might have become a mere footnote in history, had it not been for a young British musician, who ordered a left-handed 500/1, while working in a nightclub in Hamburg (West Germany) with his band. In keeping with the Höfner Company’s nomenclature this new bass received the rather uninspiring name Höfner 500/1. In 1956 a German luthier called Walter Höfner developed a comfortably light and compact semi-acoustic bass with a violin-shaped body. Other companies designed their short-scale basses from the ground up: Gibson, for example, only released its first long-scale basses – the Thunderbird II and IV models – in 1963, while Gretsch and Guild stuck to their ”modified guitars” well into the 1970s. Those companies simply used slight redesigns of their guitar models with longer necks and different pickups, in order to have something to sell to the public. To some degree this was out of pure necessity, as many guitar manufacturers didn’t regard the electric bass guitar as a serious instrument in the early days.
In 2021 short-scale basses are often seen as less desirable, as instruments purely for beginners, but not for ”serious” use.īack in the Fifties, Sixties and much of the Seventies, a wealth of great music has been recorded by bassists playing short-scale basses. Used on countless thousands of custom basses, Bartolini is the original custom bass pickup.This is a slightly shorter version of an article in Finnish published at Rockway.fi. Bartolini pickups will help you avoid having to sell someone on the pickups you chose for it.
It’s always a challenge to find buyers for your spec-built bass that agree with every choice you made in the specifications. If you are starting a bass building business and are wondering what pickups and pre-wired harnesses to be using look no further. You will notice a night and day difference in the tone of your instrument.
MUSICMASTER BASS PICKUP REPLACEMENT INSTALL
They are very satisfying to install for first timers. We recommend them equally to any bass modders and experienced luthiers alike. We are proud to be full-line stocking dealers for Bartolini. Tobias, Pedulla, Ibanez, Spector, Zon, Roscoe, Elrick, Warrior have all used Bartolini’s, and a few use them almost exclusively. A list of luthiers that have used Bartolini reads like a who’s who of modern bass building.
To this day Bartolini offers more shapes of pickups and pre-wired on-board electronic harness configurations than any other company. The sounds and shapes of these Bartolini pickups is now the standard that we compare all other pickups to. He also defined the many different shapes and sizes of pickups that we see today.
MUSICMASTER BASS PICKUP REPLACEMENT FULL
Bill worked closely with these builders creating many unique pickup designs to bring out the full range and accuracy of their instruments response- “you can hear the wood” was a common response. Some of these new luthiers had the desire for a more modern pickup design and sound. The 70’s and 80’s was to be the era of guitar modification At the same time many young, soon to be famous, luthiers were learning their trade and they needed to figure out were the pickups where to come from. Bartolini and others experimented with new concepts in tonal quality, which led to an offering of replacements that quite effectively re-voiced these instruments and allowed their customers get the sound they wanted out of the instruments they already had it was a perfect solution. And the revolution in musical styles of the late 60’s and early 70’s created the demand for new instruments and tone qualities that went beyond those of the previous years. Fender and Gibson had been bought out by CBS and Norlin. Although he may not have known it at the time Bill and his pickup contemporaries like Larry Dimarzio and Overland (EMG) were in the right place at the right time. Started by Bill Bartolini in 1973, Bartolini Pickups and Electronics was one of the very first companies to offer a pickup that was not from one of the big 5 guitar companies Fender, Gibson, Gretsch, Guild or Rickenbacker. Bartolini first appeared at the dawn of replacement pickups for electric instruments in the Early 1970’s.
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