Fender Vintage P-Bass Pickup

Like the box says, get these if you want that original Fender Precision Bass sound.
Made well, prewired to a new copper ground plate - solder in 2 wires and you're in business.

At one time I had active pickups in this 30 year old Made In Japan P bass. Run by a 9 volt battery (I routed a battery cavity under the pickguard), they were bright and "attacky", and I really liked them at the time.

Then, after some years of using those pickups, I reinstalled the originals out of a desire for change, and was amazed by the great tone. I didn't recall loving the original tone before, but this was great. That was at least 10 years ago.

Then I bought these recently to replace the original pickups. Because the original pickups sound great to me in this bass, I did this primarily 'cause I've upgraded everything on this instrument over the years - better bridge, better tuners, and I now did the electronics, thinking I could improve the instrument's tone even more.

While I can't say, "wow - it sounded awful before and now it's amazing!", I think maybe it's got better definition and clarity than before. It certainly has the traditional sound I'm looking for and I'm not wishing I hadn't bothered. I need to play and record with it more to form a clearer opinion, but so far it's everything I was hoping for, tone-wise.

I did note that the new pickups look like they're maybe manufactured better than the old stock ones.

All in all, these are the real deal, provide original spec sound, and they're made well and easy to install. It's hard to know whether you'll improve your sound in a way you'll like in any given instrument when you change pickups. But if you like upgrading your gear and experimenting, it's always worthwhile to try.

I replaced the pickups in my 1984 Fender MIJ Squire Precision with these 'Fender Vintage P-Bass' pickups. You get the pickups, the foam, the metal plate and cloth covered vintage-style wire. I had the pickups professionally fitted as I'm not that good with a soldering iron, but you may be able to install them yourself if you're handy like that. The sound quality is great, its not night and day compared to the pickups I had previously but I'm very happy with the authentic 'precision' sound, and also the build quality of these. I'm using them with Thomastik Flat strings and the bass sounds great. I've read some opinions that certain boutique makes (e.g. Lindy Frailin) are superior, but they are considerably more expensive so I decided to go with these which I think are very good value. I believe these are the pickups fitted to the reissue USA Fender P Basses so that's good enough for me.

Popped these into my MIM Precision, which already sounded half decent but snobbery about ceramic magnets got the better of me and after quite an outlay on the bass already these seemed like a sensibly priced upgrade to settle the argument.

Fitting was a little more complex for me due to being a lefty and needing to work out how to invert the base plate. For the benefit of anyone wondering how hard they are to get into a left handed bass, don't worry, with a little thought it works out easily enough.

Twenty minutes later I had the bass ready to plug in and even i could notice the tonal improvement they made. Most notably in the character of the mids and upper mids, which were significantly more pleasant than before the swap. They are a touch less aggressive than the ceramics, but the sound is better quality and spot on the classic Precision bass tone.

There is a bewildering choice of replacement pickups out there and it is hard to know which to chose, but you can't go far wrong with these.