Grateful Dead Music Forum

They appear to be single coils. Are they a proprietary pickup? An EMG one-off? I love the sound of that bass.

You could message Geoff Gould on facebook and he should be able to tell you.

https://www.facebook.com/ggould.music/

Some info here.
https://www.rukind.com/viewtopic.php?f= ... 9&start=15

Thanks, Yodasfro!

I messaged Geoff and he responded promptly. From his mouth (keyboard):

'well, this one is easy, this bass is copied off of mine. They are Bartolini pickups, custom housing I designed. The neck pickup is a single coil (vertical humbucker), the middle is a split-coil (like a P Bass), and the bridge pickup is a side by side humbucker.'

I have a pair I took out of my Modulus which looks just like that one (minus the neck pickup). Let me know if you are interested. I replaced them with Alembic pickups.

How's the Alembicized Modulus sound? That'd have to be a cool setup!

Rusty the Scoob wrote: ↑Tue Jul 17, 2018 5:57 am How's the Alembicized Modulus sound? That'd have to be a cool setup!

It's a work in progress. It doesn't sound nearly as good as the Starfire. It also doesn't sound as good as the newer TBX Moduli, but I'm not sure why. It's kind of midrange-y, which I thought the Alembic pickups would help, but not so much. It might be because of pickup placement.

Rusty the Scoob wrote: ↑Tue Jul 17, 2018 5:57 am How's the Alembicized Modulus sound? That'd have to be a cool setup!

Update: I took off the Pyramid flats, put on some DR Sunbeams, bumped up the action a bit and this thing now sounds amazing. I still want to put a real bridge on there, but it really does the job as it is. I'm also waiting for a middle pickup for Alembic.

In the meantime, I got a newer Modulus TBX with regular spacing, with Bartolinis, that sounds killer, but my hands are really too small to cope with the big neck, so I think it's going to have to go. It's got amazing punch, the B string is awesome, and the finger style tone is just amazing. They knew what they were doing!

Further update:

It now has three Alembic pickups, which helped a bit, but even more important, new frets. The old frets were a mess and it turned out that they were not in the slots solidly and were acting all springy. The tone is much, much improved. I'm still working on the best way to blend the pickups, but I'm getting some really good sounds and definitely have the bomb ability (sent the subs in the PA into thermal overload last Saturday night. Not my fault, really, but the FOH guy loves the GD and knows what to do with my bass: bring the faders up flat).