Source
r/Bass•
highesthouse

Bass Humbucker Overheating?

I have a new Sire M5 and I’m running into an issue with the neck pickup. For some background, each pickup is a dual-coil humbucker and each individually has series, parallel, and single coil switching. I notice when I switch the neck pickup into series mode after playing for a couple hours the output is around 5-10% what it normally is. Parallel and single-coil mode both seem to work just fine. After putting the bass down for an hour and trying it again, the neck pickup in series has the output I would expect from it. So far I’ve never had this issue with the bridge pickup.

My question is: has anyone else had experience with a bass humbucker overheating? I really suspect this is an issue with the heat because my room easily approaches 100 F when I play through the speaker on my amp for a couple hours; when I practice using headphones I’ve never noticed this problem, plus it seems to work again after giving it a break. If this is a common thing I’ll just keep it in mind and try not to play out of the speakers for so long, but I’m mostly hoping for some insight as to whether or not this signals some sort of defect with the pickup.

Posted Jul 3, 2021, 11:29 PM UTC

28
ChuckEye•

What kind of amp do you have that would heat your room up so much?

4
highesthouseOP•

It’s a GK MB112 200W combo amp. The room is a typical bedroom size (~150 sq ft) and I play with the gain at around 1/4. It definitely shouldn’t be getting that hot in the room anyways, but this particular room has always had a problem with being 5-10 degrees hotter than the rest of the house. It gets almost insufferably hot sometimes when I’m playing.

1
Doctah_Whoopass•

Is the floor register closed or something?

1
niftydog•

Have you changed the battery?

Series mode creates a stronger signal than parallel or single mode - perhaps this is doing something strange to the on-board preamp.

3
sshoihet•

Magnets lose strength as the temperature increases but its going to take a temperature much higher than 100F to be significant . Unless there's a short in the winding that's getting worse as you play, I'm not sure how heat would cause a problem. If the problem only affects one pickup, there may be something wrong with the pickup.

I'd never play in a room that hot and I don't play for hours straight :-)

2
highesthouseOP•

Yeah, so far it’s a highly circumstantial problem which makes it really difficult to diagnose. I guess for now I’ll keep monitoring it to see if it gets worse over time; thankfully Thomann offers a really forgiving warranty so I have time to narrow it down.

1
bassic666•

I had passive jazz bass pickups heat up so much that the pole pieces expanded and cracked the pickup casings... replaced with active emgs and havent looked back since

1
highesthouseOP•

Jesus, I’m thankful I’ve never had that happen on my passive basses! I’m actually really liking how the stock pickups on the M5 sound so I hope I don’t end up having to replace them.

0