Darkray delivered with sloped pickup.

[kingtaco619]

I am a new Musicman DarkRay owner. I am new to musicman stingray basses and was wondering if it is standard that they ship with the pickup installed at a sloped angle. Currently the pickups are closest to the strings at the G and D and slope down into the body at the E and A strings. Is this normal? And is it safe to adjust these with a few turns of the screwdriver? I really don’t want to eff this thing up. Any feedback or suggestions are appreciated.

 

[Rod Trussbroken]

Welcome to the Forum.

As pickups are set closer to the G string than the E String there will be a slight angle.

There's a FAQ sticky at the top of the Forum that deals with basic instrument setup. That will put you in the ball park. From there, further adjustments can be made to suit a players individual style.

 

[kevins]

Very safe to adjust them! The newer ones adjust with so much ease it’s tempting to constantly tweak them! No danger Unless you loosen or tighten them too much but in the case of too loose the pickups will be hitting the strings well before the point where you’ve gone too far . In the case of too tight it will physically get harder to turn. Tightening it too much is the easier mistake to make so if you feel resistance stop immediately. no one really wants their pickups that low anyways! With the built in compressor too, you probably could get some pretty great sounds out of that with closer pickups

Consequences of overtightening are a cracked pickup cover, it happened to me with a pre-eb Sabre but those guys have issues with magnet strength. Loosen it too much and you gotta put the thing back in lol.

The screws are there to be turned, and to drive people insane with tweaking sounds, but after spending a week on it you sorta get a sense for how to manipulate them and you can do a pickup height setup in an hour

 

[kevins]

Oh forgot to mention If you take off the pickguard you can see if the pickup is bottoming out while you lower it!

 

[Mu5icM@n]

This isn’t super complicated. It’s no big deal. That looks pretty normal for a stingray pickup, totally within the range of what I’d expect to see.

 

[nebadon]

This isn’t super complicated. It’s no big deal. That looks pretty normal for a stingray pickup, totally within the range of what I’d expect to see.

My came the same way and it is far from normal for Special or suggested in FAQ and New for sale ones also sounded awful before I noticed