The Big Single Story – a shift that made everything else possible

A very long time ago (2003) in a suburban SoCal three car garage I started a website and set up shop to build fancy bass guitars. I had been working my way to this moment for about 10 years since I started my music industry journey working in the back of Calebs Guitar in Redlands assembling Traveler Guitars from parts made in Mexico and doing minor repairs.  After that there were a couple years working for Steve Azola followed by twice as many at Suhr Guitars and I figured it was time to make the leap. 

Fortunately, within a manner of months I had a year’s worth of orders. This was great but there were challenges acquiring bass pickups in any shape other than your standard P, J, MM, or basic soapbar shapes. And almost no one was making anything like a dual coil with custom spacing for 6 strings or more, at least not one set at a time on a bespoke custom basis. 

One of the skills I picked up during my time at Suhr Guitars was making pickups. Right place, right time I guess. I bought Jason Lollar’s pickup winding book and managed to purchase a very basic winding machine. Then I started making the flatwork by hand with a drill press and a router table. Sketchy business.

Pretty soon I started to get inquiries from other fledgling bass builders that were starting this custom bass making journey at the same time as me. And it pretty quickly occurred to me that I might be able to sell enough pickups to support having employees help me make them. So that’s what I did. 

We acquired a laser cutting machine and I found an amazing deal on a Tanac computer controlled winding machine. Exciting! (These are still the best machines we’ve found and now we have five of them.)

How do the Big Singles fit into this genesis story? Simple - by gaining access to a supply of empty soapbar covers. This was amazing at the time. Suddenly we didn’t have to make wood covers and my mind had freedom to wonder “what else might fit in these covers?”

Next comes a classic case of inspiration hitting in the shower. I went to bed with ideas swimming in my head and by the time the ritualistic nature of the shower showed up the next morning these ideas had formed into something of a twist. 

In these early days I was deeply affected by a budding friendship with George Furlanetto, the mastermind and magician behind the amazing and widely coveted F Basses. I took a couple things from this relationship - I wanted to make 34.5” 5 string J basses, I wanted to make my own preamp (George even sold us a handful of his legendary 3 bands before I had my own in production), and I wanted to make stacked J pickups. 

These turned out to be quite a challenge for many reasons that I won’t get into here. But basically, the idea of having a skinny ass stacked J pickup in these nice new fat covers we’d just started sourcing seemed like a waste of space. 

Now I can’t say with certainty, but I may have been singing Peter Gabriel’s Washing of the Water when the idea to twist the poles floated into my awareness. That shower ended very quickly as I couldn’t get down to the shop fast enough to try this crazy idea and see how it sounded. The Fat Stack was born. We were gonna USE that valuable space we’d been given.

“Wait, that’s not the Big Single”, I can hear you saying.  No but that’s where the BS started! 

The Fat Stack was my version of the F Bass stacked J pickups that hide under those gorgeous wood covers. These went over quite well and also provided an instant visual identity that was new in the bass space. 

The next question was “what else can we do in these covers? Maybe something simpler and more basic and more affordable. Hmmm, how much wire could I fit in this cover if I did a single coil with a heavy Formvar wire and a hand scattered wind pattern?” As added fuel to try a single coil the fact that most players were preferring the single coil mode of the Fat Stacks made it a fairly obvious next step. 

I think we might have tried a few different wind patterns and turn counts. But it became obvious right away that this was really something fresh and had its own rich bold character. We quickly found a balanced response and started selling them as well as installing them in the fledgling Nordy line of J basses. 

It may sound crazy now but I really had no idea what good tone was back then. I knew what the basic components of a pickup were and I knew what I liked when I played all the fancy expensive basses at NAMM shows, but the connection between what came out of the speaker and how it got that way from the vibration of a string was baffling. All I could do was try to pay attention to how creative and engaged a new pickup or bass made me feel. If I lost track of time when I sat down to check something out, if I started asking “what else will this do?”, if that adventure ran long and turned into something approaching joy and I looked up finally from a creative daze to a clock run away from me - well that was what I was running on. 

Fast forward to 2025 and the Big Single is the best selling pickup we make by a good margin thanks to the fact that Ibanez has put tens of thousands of them into their basses over the last nearly 20 years. The list of well known players that use and love these pickup is long and varied. I’ve managed to have a continuing deep and rewarding creative adventure in this bass corner of the music industry (It’s really the coolest corner as we bass players well know :-)) and it all really starts with the Big Single and the relationship it brought with one of the biggest guitar brands in the world. 

I couldn’t be more grateful. Thanks to all of you who are a part of our Big Single story and family. Words can’t say how much I, and everyone who works here, appreciate what you’ve helped create. 

Warmest regards,
Carey