We get more emails about bass pickup mounting than you’d expect.
Not about tone. Not about winding specs or magnet types. The emails are always the same basic complaint: “My pickup sinks.” Or: “The screw just spins and nothing happens.” Or our personal favourite: “I turned it half a turn and now the E-string side is way louder than the G.”
Every time, we write back the same thing: it’s not the pickup. It’s not the bass. It’s a #4 wood screw that Leo Fender chose in 1951 because he could buy a thousand of them for almost nothing from a hardware store in Fullerton, California.
And honestly? It was a brilliant choice. For about the first fifty years.
The Service Technician Who Built an Empire
Leo Fender didn’t play guitar. Didn’t play bass. Didn’t play anything, really. He was a radio repairman with an accounting background who happened to notice that the musicians coming through his shop in the late 1940s couldn’t hear themselves over the drums.
The upright bass players had it worst. They were hauling around a piece of furniture, getting drowned out by horn sections, and breaking their backs loading into cars at 2am. In 1951, Leo gave them something smaller, louder, and — crucially — fixable.
The Precision Bass was designed like a radio, not like a violin. Every part could be removed and replaced with a screwdriver. The neck bolted on. The pickguard held the wiring harness. And the pickup — a single-coil unit borrowed almost directly from the Telecaster — screwed into the body with two wood screws and a piece of foam underneath.
That foam? Legend says Leo found it in the weatherstripping aisle of his local hardware store. Dense neoprene, the kind you’d use to seal a door. He cut it to size, jammed it under the pickup, and screwed the whole thing down. The foam pushed the pickup up. The screws held it down. You adjusted height by turning the screws. Done.
It took about forty seconds to install at the factory. If the foam wore out, you replaced it. If a screw stripped, you glued in a toothpick and re-drilled. Total repair time: five minutes. Total cost: almost nothing.
People call Leo Fender the Henry Ford of electric guitars. It’s accurate. He wanted instruments produced at volume, serviceable in the field, and affordable for working musicians. The pickup mounting system was never designed to be elegant. It was designed to work — and to be fixed when it stopped working.
1957: The Split That Changed Everything (and Nothing)
Six years in, Leo redesigned the Precision Bass pickup from the ground up. The original single-coil had two problems: it hummed like a fluorescent light in a diner, and it sounded harsh in a way that made sound engineers wince.
The solution was the split-coil humbucker — two coils, each handling two strings, wired out of phase to cancel the hum. It’s the pickup that defined the sound of modern bass. Motown. Punk. Metal. Country. If you’ve heard a bass line on the radio in the last sixty years, odds are good it was a split-coil P-Bass.
But here’s the thing nobody talks about: when Leo redesigned the pickup, he didn’t redesign the mounting. Same #4 wood screws. Same neoprene foam. Same “screw it into the wood and hope for the best” engineering. He’d moved onto a pickguard-mounted system by then — the electronics pre-assembled on an anodized aluminium plate — but the fundamental interaction was identical. Screw threads into wood. Foam pushes up. Gravity and friction hold it in place.
The Jazz Bass followed in 1960 with two smaller single-coil pickups, each mounted the same way. The Mustang Bass came in 1964 with its shorter 30-inch scale. Different pickups, different placement, same screws, same foam.
Leo had found his formula. And for a guy who didn’t play bass, he’d somehow also found the sweet spot — that exact position along the 34-inch scale where the pickup captures the right balance of warmth and definition. Every bass manufacturer since has been designing around that benchmark.
The Thump, The Doom, and The Smash
What Leo Fender designed in a factory became legend on a stage.
James Jamerson played a 1962 Precision Bass he called the “Funk Machine.” He kept the chrome bridge cover on — most players had started removing it by then — because he used it as an anchor for his right hand. Underneath that cover sat the original foam mute, pressing against the strings to kill sustain. Add heavy-gauge La Bella flatwounds that he never changed (literally — legend says only breakage prompted a string change), and you had the most influential bass tone in history.
Every Motown hit you know — “My Girl,” “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” “What’s Going On” — that warm, pillowy thump underneath? That’s a P-Bass pickup, mounted on foam, held in by two wood screws. The foam mute did half the tonal work. Jamerson understood something instinctive about the system: the simplicity wasn’t a limitation. It was the sound.
On the other end of the spectrum, Jaco Pastorius took his 1962 Jazz Bass — the “Bass of Doom” — and stripped everything off. Pickguard, gone. Chrome covers, gone. Frets, gone (famously removed with a butter knife and sealed with marine epoxy). Jaco wanted nothing between the strings and the wood except the pickups and their screws. He was, in a way, the first bassist to obsess over the mounting — not by upgrading it, but by removing everything around it.
And then there’s Paul Simonon of The Clash, smashing his Precision Bass at the New York Palladium in 1979 — an image so iconic it became the cover of London Calling. What’s less known is what Simonon said afterward: the replacement bass the label gave him was a CBS-era Fender, and he hated it. Called it “stupid thin.” The pickups didn’t sound the same. The feel was wrong. Something had changed in the wood, the winding, the way everything was put together. The mounting system was identical — same screws, same foam — but the instrument was different.
That’s the paradox of Leo’s design. The system is so simple that everything around it matters.
The Slow-Motion Failure Nobody Talks About
Here’s the part we know well, because we hear about it every week.
A bassist buys a new instrument — or inherits one, or finds one in a pawn shop. They play it for a while. At some point, they decide to adjust the pickup height. Maybe the E-string is too boomy, or the G-string is disappearing in the mix. They grab a screwdriver and give the screw a quarter-turn.
Nothing happens.
They turn it again. The screw rotates freely. The pickup doesn’t move. They look closer and realise the screw is spinning in its hole — the wood threads have stripped out.
This happens faster than you’d think. Alder — the standard Fender body wood since the late 1950s — is a relatively soft hardwood. The fibres grip a #4 wood screw well enough the first few times. But every time you adjust, you’re re-cutting those fibres. After a handful of adjustments over a few years, the hole is wider than the screw.
The traditional fix? Pull the screw out. Jam a toothpick — or a matchstick, or a chopstick, or whatever’s in the kitchen drawer — into the hole with some wood glue. Wait for it to dry. Re-drill. Screw it back in.
It works. Sort of. For a while. Until the new hole strips out too, because now you’re screwing into a cocktail of soft wood, dried glue, and whatever you shoved in there at midnight before a gig.
If you spend time on TalkBass or Reddit, you’ll find hundreds of threads about this. The tone is always the same: a mixture of frustration and resignation. “My P-Bass pickup keeps sinking.” “Jazz Bass bridge pickup won’t stay up.” “Any tricks besides the toothpick thing?” The community has tried everything — larger screws, longer screws, different foam, springs instead of foam, even epoxy directly in the hole.
Springs, by the way, deserve their own paragraph. The “springs vs. foam” debate in the bass community is surprisingly heated. Foam purists argue it gives a solid feel and doesn’t let the pickup wobble — important if you use the pickup as a thumb rest (and half of all P-Bass players do). Spring converts argue that foam degrades, compresses, and eventually turns to dust, while springs last forever. Both sides are right. Neither side is addressing the actual problem, which is that the screw has nowhere solid to grab.
What Leo Couldn’t Buy in 1951
Leo Fender’s foam-and-wood-screw system was genius for 1951. It was cheap, fast, field-serviceable, and good enough for a factory producing instruments at industrial scale. But Leo was working with what was available in postwar Fullerton — and what was available was sheet metal screws, neoprene weatherstripping, and the expectation that a working musician’s instrument was a tool, not an heirloom.
Seventy-five years later, the expectation has changed. Basses get handed down. Vintage instruments sell for five figures. Players keep the same instrument for decades and adjust their pickups seasonally. The tool became an heirloom, but the mounting hardware didn’t evolve with it.
That’s the gap we kept seeing. Not a gap in tone, or in design, or in pickup technology. A gap in a tiny, overlooked piece of mounting hardware that hadn’t been rethought since Eisenhower was president.
The Fix We Built
Our Bass Pickup Screws & Threaded Inserts kit replaces the wood screws with something Leo would have used if it had been available to him: threaded inserts that screw permanently into the body wood, paired with machine screws that thread into the inserts with precision.
The inserts are M3 — small enough to fit standard bass pickup screw holes. They go in with a mounting tool we include for free. Once they’re in, you’re adjusting metal against metal. No more wood fibres to strip. No more toothpick patches. No more foam debates — use whatever you want underneath, foam or springs or surgical tubing, because the screw-to-body connection is solid either way.
The machine screws come in nickel or black, depending on your hardware. They turn smoothly and hold position. You can adjust pickup height a thousand times and the hole never gets larger. That’s not marketing language — that’s just how metal threads in metal work.
We priced the kit at €7.90. The whole thing — inserts, screws, mounting tool. We wanted it to be the kind of upgrade you don’t have to think about. Less than a set of strings. Cheaper than the fuel to drive to a tech who’ll charge you forty euros to shove a toothpick in a hole.
Who This Is Actually For
If your bass is new and the screws are tight — honestly, you probably don’t need this yet. You will, eventually. But not yet.
If you’ve adjusted your pickup height more than a few times and the screws are starting to feel loose, this is the moment. Install the inserts now, while the holes are still close to original size, and you’ll never think about it again.
If you’re already in toothpick territory — the screws spinning, the pickup sinking, that spongy feeling when you try to adjust — this is the permanent fix. The inserts grip fresh wood around the edges of the stripped hole and give the machine screws something solid to thread into.
And if you’re a tech who works on bass setups, you already know. You’ve glued a hundred toothpicks. You’ve drilled a hundred new holes. You’ve told a hundred customers “it should hold now” while knowing it probably won’t. This kit is the thing you install once so the customer never calls back about that problem again.
Leo Would Have Used Them
We think about this sometimes — what Leo Fender would have done with modern materials. He wasn’t precious about tradition. He didn’t keep the bolt-on neck because it was aesthetically pure. He kept it because it was the most practical joint he could build at scale. If threaded inserts had been cheap and available in 1951, he’d have used them. He was a service technician at heart. He would have loved the idea of a screw that never strips.
The Precision Bass is seventy-five years old. The Jazz Bass is sixty-six. The foam-and-wood-screw system has outlasted every trend, every competing design, every “revolutionary” alternative. It earned its place.
But the one thing that was always going to fail — the wood-to-metal interface that degrades with every turn — now has a permanent fix. And it costs less than a pack of strings.
Leo would approve.
FAQ
What size are bass pickup mounting screws?
Standard Fender-style bass pickups (P-Bass, Jazz Bass) use #4 or #6 wood screws roughly 3mm diameter. The Nectite bass pickup kit uses M3 machine screws that thread into stainless steel inserts, replacing the wood screw entirely.
How do I fix a stripped bass pickup screw hole?
The traditional fix is a toothpick with wood glue, but it’s temporary. A permanent solution is to install threaded inserts small metal bushings that screw into the wood and accept machine screws. Once installed, the hole can’t strip because the screw threads into metal, not wood.
Should I use foam or springs for bass pickup mounting?
Both work. Foam gives a solid, stable feel (important if you use the pickup as a thumb rest) but degrades over time. Springs last forever but can let the pickup wobble slightly. The real issue is usually the screw, not the padding underneath if the screw threads are solid, either material works fine.
Can I install threaded inserts in a vintage bass without damaging it?
Yes. The inserts screw into the existing screw holes no drilling required if the holes are within standard size range. The modification is low-impact and reversible: if you ever want to go back to wood screws, the insert holes are only marginally larger than the original screw holes.
Will changing bass pickup mounting hardware affect my tone?
The pickup itself doesn’t change same magnets, same coils, same signal. Some players report that a more rigid mounting connection transfers body vibrations more consistently, but the primary benefit is practical: reliable height adjustment that stays where you set it.
Related Reading
- How Eddie Van Halen Killed the Mounting Ring The direct mount pickup story for guitar players
- Your Guitar Neck Is Held On by Hope The same stripped-screw problem, but for neck joints
- How to Fix Stripped Guitar Neck Screws The permanent solution, step by step
The Guitar Storyteller is a recurring column by Nectite — a small German guitar hardware company that makes threaded inserts and machine screws for people who’d rather fix things once.