Bring to original specs your "Mudbucker pickup".

 You have to send the donor pickup and I will send it back with the mod.

The Mudbucker: is a sidewinder humbucker pickup, this means that the coils are side by side with each other, and in this case, the bar magnets are located outside the bobbins. The magnet field is transmitted through a steel-plate. So, because the magnet field is low, the coils have to be big. The vintage ones have around 30 Kohm of 42 awg copper wire and two alnico 5 magnets. In the 70s the EB basses have a mudbucker with different specs, with around 1,5 Kohm due to the use of a thicker copper wire (40 awg), probably to reduce costs (40 awg need less turns to complete the bobbin). The sound of this late version is not so good, and doesn’t have that “subsonic” character of the early mudbuckers. So and what about the actual versions:

• The Gibson Rhythm SG Bass pickup: have ceramic magnets and a 9.75 Kohm output (42 awg copper wire). It’s an attemp to give a new tone to the mudbucker sound but it doesn’t get close to the original version.
• The epiphone version: have ceramic magnets and a 1.5 Kohm output (40 awg copper wire). It is like a poor man 70s version of the mudbucker.

In both cases the size of the bobbins, the structure and the placing of the magnets is like the vintage ones, but what is wrong are the magnets, the copper wire and/or the number of turns. So I decided to do a mod for this mudbuckers, and to bring them to original specs. The result is really great, even the epiphone EB3 bass sounds now very similar to a 60s EB3 bass. The resulting output is much higher and the tone gets clear and with that “subsonic” character. Is a very special pickup with no any other options, is not similar to a pbass or a rick, or even a Tbird, the sound that brings this pickup belongs to another sonic league.

I recorded some sound samples before and after the mod. I did it with the bass direct plug to an apogged duet. Recorded in ableton live and use the bass amp plugin that came with this DAW. About the sound samples input volume, here is a simple way to see the difference:

• Epiphone mudbucker input volume: 17.
• Mudbucker mod input volume: 7.

So, this means that after the mod the pickup have a higher volume, and as you can hear, the tone is also very different:

Epiphone sound sample

Mudbucker mod soundsample

Here is another sound sample of the mudbucker mod:

I do wire the mudbucker with a 4 wires lead cable, so it allows to wire the pickup in parallel to have a more open sound, or even to use just one of the coils. 

The resulting pickup have 30 Kohm and alnico 5 magnets, with the exact specs that the early mudbucker pickup.