Selling Jazz bass pickups Tonerider Jazz Plus

[FaustoB]

Hello!
for sale a pair of Tonerider Jazz Plus pickups (bridge and neck pickup).
These were installed in one of my builds on a fretless bass.

This is a great and very affordable upgrade to any jazz bass, whether it's a Pitbull, Squier, custom build, or if you are simply interested in trying something different.

They come in original box. Pick up from Lower Blue Mountains NSW, or could ship at buyer expense.

$90 for both + $10 for shipping to anywhere in Australia, international shipping TBC
($ is intended Australian $)

a couple of shorts vids showcasing these pickups in action, here and here

[fender3x]

I am not really in the market...but the vids sound great and the bass looks fantastic. Very unique for a JB and tasty.

I am working on finishing a fretless. Hope that I can get it to sound as good, albeit I don't think my technique will be.

What are you replacing the Toneriders with?

[FaustoB]

Thanks! I appreciate the nice comments!
To be honest I was very happy with the Tonerider Jazz Plus, I found them to be a major and very affordable upgrade from the stock pickups that come with the kit.

a month ago or so I upgraded the bridge on this build, shortened the scale, and did some other jobs (I might write them on the build diary for this instrument), and while I had the bass all apart I decided to install the Dimarzio model J, kept the same exact electronics (pots and capacitor).
It's basically a different instrument now, I am not saying better, it just changed the tone profile a lot, which is a bit more in line with what I like to play in this period. I am enjoying these Dimarzio at the moment but I don't feel like accumulating too much gear, that's why I am selling the Tonerider.

About the fretless technique, I can give fretless bass lessons if you are interested, let me know!

[fender3x]

I had a set of DiMarzio J's at one point. I had them on a fretted 34" scale bass. I liked them OK, but I am not sure I'd trade the tone you are getting from the Toneriders for them.

I had my DiMarzios on one of the first basses I ever tried to mod. One thing I really loved about them was that customer support at DiMarzio would send me custom wiring diagrams for anything I wanted to do with them. I wanted to have a Volume-Blend-Tone setup with a push-pull switches on the tone and volume controls to do series-parallel. They drew me up a special wiring chart that to do it.

[Simon Barden]

I know it was a very practical thing to do, but changing the scale length and then after a while, changing the pickups would have been a more instructive way of hearing the differences in the pickups.

Moving the bridge will have changed the part of the string each pickup sensed, so either added more treble or more bass depending whether the saddle shifted forwards or backwards (I'm assuming it was a significant scale length change rather than just a couple of mm). That itself would have notably changed the tonality.

But obviously you've now got hum-cancelling pickups which can be a big plus. I fitted some Bartolini J-style hum-cancelling pickups to a Yamaha BB604 bass of mine that had very noisy single coils and it made a huge difference to its usability (and it did sound nice).

[FaustoB]

I had a set of DiMarzio J's at one point. I had them on a fretted 34" scale bass. I liked them OK, but I am not sure I'd trade the tone you are getting from the Toneriders for them.

I had my DiMarzios on one of the first basses I ever tried to mod. One thing I really loved about them was that customer support at DiMarzio would send me custom wiring diagrams for anything I wanted to do with them. I wanted to have a Volume-Blend-Tone setup with a push-pull switches on the tone and volume controls to do series-parallel. They drew me up a special wiring chart that to do it.

I wasn't expecting that me try to sell these pickups would spark such a debate!

Thank you so much fender3x for sharing your experience with the Dimarzio J and the custom wiring diagrams. Very interesting!

In my opinion a comparison between pickups is not absolute (ie pickup XYZ is better than pickup ABC), but instead it depends on so many factors (type of instrument, style of playing, amplification, effects, type of strings, genre of music played, personal taste, sonic context with other musicians...).

I am not a huge expert in terms of pick ups, I judge with my hobbyist ears primarily, but in my experience with strings for example, sometimes a set of strings might sound great on a certain instrument, and just sound not right or average on another.

[FaustoB]

I know it was a very practical thing to do, but changing the scale length and then after a while, changing the pickups would have been a more instructive way of hearing the differences in the pickups.

Moving the bridge will have changed the part of the string each pickup sensed, so either added more treble or more bass depending whether the saddle shifted forwards or backwards (I'm assuming it was a significant scale length change rather than just a couple of mm). That itself would have notably changed the tonality.

But obviously you've now got hum-cancelling pickups which can be a big plus. I fitted some Bartolini J-style hum-cancelling pickups to a Yamaha BB604 bass of mine that had very noisy single coils and it made a huge difference to its usability (and it did sound nice).

Good point Simon.
The scale length was about a 5mm-6mm change (5-6mm shorter). It's a mod that I shared & documented in some of my build diaries. This mod allows a fretless JB or PB bass to have an extra "fret" (21 frets, 3 full octaves from lower E to high E on the G string), instead of the standard 20 "frets" (from E to Eb, very weird to me).

When you play a fretless JB or PB with a full 34" scale, you can feel that that high E on the G string is almost there on the fretboard, just a mm or two out.. shortening the scale slightly makes the instrument a bit more fun to play, and having 3 full octaves feels like "closing a circle", without any noticeable change in playability. imo.

About the sound, it's probably hard to say, as my upgrade approach wasn't very scientific as you correctly noted, but based on what I hear, the sound profile changed a lot, way beyond what 5-6mm could cause, but I might be wrong.

[Simon Barden]

I'm certainly guilty of instigating two changes at once, so that it's never clear whether any change in sound is down to one item or the other, or a mixture of both. But afterwards, the bit of my brain that wants to know for future reference as to what effect each bit has, is definitely shouting out to me 'you twat!'.

[fender3x]

A couple of things just occurred to me... A nice thing about good pickups is that they don't lose value. You could, conceivably, try both pickups and see which you like best.

More practically, and sorry for forgetting to mention this before, but I just remembered. DiMarzio J's are slightly larger than standard J-bass pickups. You may want to make sure they'll fit...particularly the bridge pup before you sell the Toneriders, unless you've already checked ;-)

(They fit in my Frankenjazz...but I read on the website that this can be an issue).

[Simon Barden]

Stacked, so they’ll certainly be a bit deeper than normal.