Absolutely love them and can't say enough good things about them.
These are my first Nordstrand pickups and I had them installed into my Sadowsky Modern 5:
I love the look, feel, and playability of this instrument. However, the pickups that come stock - while being great quality - are very scooped sounding. They were manufactured by Seymour Duncan and if you do some research, they intentionally remove a lot of mids and boost the lows and highs. While they sounded good in some situations, I found that they just didn't have that aggressive midrange kick that I wanted.
So I had some Aguilar DCBs installed to see if they would get me closer to the tone I wanted. While they did sound very good, those pickups are very "clear and open" sounding. They don't seem to color your bass at all but instead just open up the tonal range of your instrument as it is. My particular bass is a little bit unusual in the sense that the pickups are both close to the bridge. So it lends itself to a more thin-sounding tone. Also, my bass has an ash body and a rosewood board, which is a little unusual because you usually see ash paired with a maple board, or alder paired with a rosewood board.
So I felt the bass needed something to inject mids into it. No way was I swapping out the preamp, so I did some research and learned about Nordy Fat Stacks. Their tone profile includes aggressively boosted mids - exactly what I was looking for - but with retained lows and crisp highs.
Honestly, I wasn't too sure that they would make that big of a difference. But I took a chance and ordered them and had them installed by a pro here in Nashville.
When I got the bass back, I was overwhelmed. The instrument is sooooo much more aggressive and has a fat, warm, burpy midrange that just sings. I would pit it against any of the best basses I've ever heard. Those Nordy's took an already great bass and made it that much better.
The best part is that I actually have 2 types of pickups. I got the guy who installed them to put a push/pull pot under the volume control. When the pot is down, I'm running true Fat Stacks in hum cancelling stacked-coil mode. When the switch is up, the dummy coil is turned off and I have Big Singles instead!
Both modes sound fantastic. One thing to keep in mind though is that the single coil mode is much hotter, so when I pull up I have to dial back the volume a bit. It's a slightly more aggressive tone with a little more "air" around each note. Very very jazz bass like. But the hum cancelling mode sounds very similar, but slightly less output and a little more "wool" around each note. But with the switch you get the best of both worlds.
I still can't believe how much these pickups changed this bass - especially after the other pickups I had installed didn't really make as big of a difference. As far as I'm concerned I'm now a Nordstrand convert and will be singing their praises for a long long time.
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