We receive questions every day from clients asking our opinions on different EMG pickup combinations in their bass. The challenge is that we all hear and experience the sound of our instruments through our own lens of experience and style. By definition, that opinion is only valid if you share the same experience and style.
Instead, we prefer to share this excellent video from The Bass Channel and EMGtv. They perform a back-to-back playthrough of all the EMG soapbar pickup combinations. It’s just a single riff played through each pickup combination, which makes it easy to hear differences in tone and attack.
There are no chapter markers or index to each unique pickup pairing, so we created this handy-dandy table to make it easier to jump to the pickups YOU are comparing: