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BGRA: Aero Instrument humbuckers, 5-string, either E- or H-ser

Manufacturer Aero Instrument Model humbuckers, 5-string, either E- or H-ser
Reviewer Aaron Mendez
Experience 18 Item owned 1-2 years
Review Date 2004-11-30 Price paid N/A
Sizenarrow 5
Shapesoapbar
Typesee website
Othersee website - http://www.aeroinstrument.com/pickups.html
Larry Pollack at Aero Instrument maintains that his pickups should not be internally preamped. Having tried it, I quite agree - but this is very dependent on the style of music, instrumental context, and the quality of one's AD/DA converters when recording (through a Crane Song "Spider," they are sublime indeed). My feeling is that Aeros are elegant, refined, austere, nostalgic and modest, like a 12-year-old scotch or a 50-year-old Zen master. It has taken me two years to get used to them, because it took that long for the proper combination of pickup, string, setup and musical style to coalesce around a particular (Stambaugh Musical Designs) bass: Aero humbuckers, D'Addario flats, low action, style a la Shakespeare, Barrett, Laswell, Wobble, Jamerson.

With a Bartolini NTMB-AP 3-band pre installed I usually run it in passive mode, which bypasses all controls except for volume and blend. This removes tone pot loading, a difference I can clearly hear, and a revelation. The next step is to remove the pre and ALL passive pots, leaving only a rotary switch pickup selector with an output bypass as a 4th position.

Due to the peculiar vintage voice of these pickups, use of the internal pre throws into high relief the fact that "something alien" is added...and the eq ends up sounding like an effect - rather odd and not appropriate for my applications. I've found careful outboard processing, when needed, to be much more effective.

clarity (95%)
value (95%)
overall (98%)
for MY specific purposes with one PARTICULAR bass...YMMV
The BGRA is generously underwritten by David King of Bass Guitar Systems.
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