I have been fishing around for a bit more vintage style pickup for an ES-style bass, and when I saw these I almost fell out of my chair:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Hot-Mini-Chr...0AAOSwBahVcYYU
What the heck was a Seymour Duncan stamp doing on the bottom of a cheap Asian pickup? I have heard of people using the real SD minis as a drop in replacement pickup on T-Bird basses, and know that they the real ones have bar magnets, so they are at least ballpark suitable for both bass and guitar.
So I bought couple, and they arrived today. Sure enough, one had the Seymour logo on the bottom, exactly like the pics on evilbay. The other did not have the logo. They both have four leads so you run the coils in serial, parallel, out of phase or single coil. Lots of possibilities. Both measured 7K. If you use two of these you'd want separate volume controls or a blend pot to get balanced output.
They don't have the high quality braided shield covering the leads that genuine SD's have...and although they use the same wire colors as SD, the colors don't seem to mean the same thing. On these the red and green wires are joined, and the black is joined to the uninsulated ground wire. On real SD's the white and black would be one coil and green and red the other, so green and red would not be connected.
I could not resist popping one open when it got here. Inside there were two coils wrapped around a bar, just like in the real ones. Under them was what appears to be an Alnico bar magnet.
They are more or less as advertised by the seller. That does not mean they are SDs, nor does it mean they will sound good in a bass. Still, at the price, if they sound like crappy, at least I won't have spent the house payment on them.
Will report as I learn more about them as I know more... but since my build is likely to go slow, may not have a sound check for some time to come.
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Originally Posted by tonyw
