Mighty Mite MMSP4-F/BK Bass Pickup

I recently bought a Dean ‘Edge 09’ bass (also reviewed here on UGT), and while I like the bass overall, especially considering what I paid for it, I’ve always felt that the pickup fell just a little short. It doesn’t have the ‘presence’ I think a good bass pickup should have, and the attack of a note seemed very sluggish and slow.

Mighty Mite Passive Bass Soapbar Pickup Review

Well, $20 fixed all that, by replacing the stock pickup with a Mighty Mite MMSP4-F/BK passive soapbar.

This is a standard-sized four-string soapbar pickup with two offset hum-canceling coils, and one mounting hole in the middle of each end of the housing. Inside, the coils are oriented much like the coils in the two halves of a P-Bass pickup array. The coil sensing the E & A strings is toward the ‘front’ of the housing, and the coil sensing the D & G strings is set back toward the ‘rear’. The housing itself is black plastic (probably ABS), and the coils are epoxy-potted into it, making for a very robust construction.

Tone-wise, this is a very full-ranged pickup, with a thick, fat bottom-end and a snappy, crisp high-end. Everything in between is fully present, as well. Its attack response is immediate and authoritative. In other words, it’s good ‘n punchy! The output seems to be a good deal ‘hotter’ than the pickup it replaced, though I didn’t measure its DC resistance before I installed it.

A twenty-dollar price for a bass pickup doesn’t evoke much confidence in the quality or tone, but this was 20 dollars very well spent, in my opinion. That Dean bass went from being a rather dull-sounding, mid-range-y, ‘thuddy’ bass with no ‘liveliness’ in its tone, to being a very nice-sounding, responsive instrument with nothing more than dropping this Mighty Mite pickup in the hole, driving two screws, and soldering two wires. Before, trying to ‘pop-n-slap’ on this bass came out sounding more like ‘slug-n-bludgeon’. Now it gives me some good old-school funk tones when I ‘spank’ it. Now, every time I pick it up, I want to ‘whip it good’!