How to Adjust Pickup Height on a Bass Guitar

Video Transcript

"THE FERRET: All right. On Fender bass, you've got two sets of pickups. This pickup here is going to give you the volume and balance for these two strings, and the one over here, these two strings. You've got two screws on each pickup where you've kinda, kind of angled them to get the right balance, and they use a Phillips head screwdriver. Basically, you want to nice balance between all the strings, the lower strings. The fatter strings here are going to probably give you more output and volume so they compensate for that. Sometimes, this pickup over here needs to be a little bit closer. The thing you want to make sure of those, that you don't get the strings too close because a lot of bass players play with their fingers, or a pick, and you don't want a pickup--strings hitting the pick-ups and things like that. So you kinda want to start off low and not get up too high. Better to do that than putting the pickups too close to the strings. So we're going to check the volume balance between the strings. Now, if you hear like I hear on there, it sounds like this lowest string maybe dropping out a little bit. It sounds like it's a little bit lower in volume than the other strings, so we're going to bring this pickup up just a little bit, and see if that takes care of it. It seems like it took care of it but it also made the A string louder. So now, we need to bring it back down just a little bit. And we might bring the other pickup just up a little bit. We'll continue that until we get it just right."