I've also heard this for a long time - at least 20-25 years - first time may have been from Paul Chandler when I worked at Gary Brawer Stringed Instrument Repair in San Francisco (not certain on that but heard the same quite a few other times). Mike Lull and Jeff Ament spoke about this recently with Bass Player mag (I had mentioned that to Jeff years ago as well)
ML I was a Thunderbird fanatic back in the ’70s, and I’ve owned a bunch of them. But I found them to always be a little unwieldy—they played kinda funny and sounded tremendous. And what says “rock” more than a Thunderbird bass? I hated the ergonomics, but loved the sound. So I put my mind to making a bass that balanced well, and sounded like the originals. It was more of a task than I thought. We designed a new bridge and tailpiece. I took a set of original ’64 Thunderbird pickups apart and found out exactly why they sounded the way they did. I started making pickup covers out of a nickel-silver alloy, magnets out of alnico 4. A typical humbucker has two coils and a magnet down below. This one has two coils with the magnet standing vertically between them. The result is a thin, very high-output humbucker. The neck pickup measures 8k [resonant frequency], and the neck pickup is 9k. The steel base plate becomes part of the magnet structure. I had to have all these pieces made from scratch. In the process of researching this project, I found the company that made pickup covers for Gibson back in the ’60s.
JA Those original pickups were for lap steel guitar, right?
ML Gibson had discontinued an 8-string lap steel in 1962, and they had a ton of these pickup coils laying around. They took two of those coils, stuck them to a steel base plate, and put a nickel-silver alloy cover on it, and suddenly they had a new bass pickup. So I made them just like that. The T-Bass pickup sounds exactly like the original ‘60s Thunderbird pickup, but they’re more consistent.
