Deep into my Essence (pickups height content)

[michele]

 Hi guys, as I received polish and trussrod tool from Alembic I decided to give my Essence a nice clean and an in depth look at the setup.
After cleaning the body and oiling the fingerboard, as neck relief and bridge height were already to my liking, I put a fresh set of strings and looked into pickups height following the excellent threads in the Must Read section here.
The pickups seemed in a quite unbalanced position, especially the bridge one which was almost touching the strings on the G side. So I decided to start from blank and completely loosen the visible screws in order to perform height adjustment via the screws you can't see, those beneath the holes. While this worked quite well for the neck pickup, I noticed that the bridge pickup actually adjusted in height acting on the visible screws, those which are supposed just to lock the pickup in place after you've adjusted the height with the unseen ones.
As I turned those screws I had a "springy" feeling under the screwdriver which seems strange to me as I read here that no springs or sponges are supposed to be in there. I took off the strings, took off the bridge pickup and ... there were actually two springs around the screws that lock the pickup in place! So the actual pickup height was set by those screws, while the other screws (those which were supposed to do the job) really had no effect!
Turned out that one of the height adjustment screw was blocked into its threaded metal female part and to adjust the pickup in height the previous owners put springs into both the "locker" screws, turning them into actual height adjustment screws in a more conventional way. While to an extent it worked, the pickup was in an unbalanced position as it was able to move up or down just on the spring side, while the other side remained fixed at the height determined by the "locked" screw.
Educated by Joey's great post on setup, I took those springs away and with a drop of WD40 I unlocked the screw and made again the whole pickup adjustment system work the way it was intended to be!
Now, on a side note, I became aware of what even a small adjustment in pickups height could do for your tone. Better yet, I guess I'll buy myself one of those new pan modules with two gain trimpots which seems to me a little stroke of genius and the definitive tool to have full control over your tone.

[David Houck]

Good to hear that you got the pickup height adjustment working correctly.   

[edwin]

Great job! My bass is at the factory right now getting the pickups installed correctly (among other things). I can't wait to have it all working properly and be able to fine tune the tone with the pickup height.

[growlypants]

Congrats, Michele, on 1) Recognizing there was a problem,  and 2) Having the courage to dive in and solve it!  I'm sure your bass is saying to itself "NOW I feel better!!"

[bigredbass]

Happy you worked on your bass with results.  The pickup heights you just tune to the tone your ears prefer.  I generally start with them parallel to the strings as a starting point and an equal distance from the lowest and highest string, depending if it's 4,5, 6, whatever.  Then you can work out from there.  Some prefer a bit further away from the low strings and closer to the high strings, there's lots of ways to skin that cat depending on what you want to hear.  I'll use a small rule to be able to adjust them exactly, another part of wanting to commit my personal setups to a set of numbers.  Remember that these are low impedance pickups, so you can run them very close to the strings with no ill effects if that's what you prefer.  It's all down to your ears, there is no 'correct' setting.