I stuck the pickups and rings on there as a goof whilst I had the electronics ripped out. The bass came with two hotrail humbuckers that were too hot and too mids-forward to really work in an 8 string bass. They were wired to some illogically sequenced 6-way rotary switch that felt cheap. I decided to rewire the bass with a 3-way, volume and tone control, and just took off from there.