Gah...
Still working on that bass. Electronics seem to be borked worse than I thought.
I replaced the input, but that didn't help with cleaning up the signal. It's still intermittently fuzzy on pretty much every setting. The problem is, I can't tell if it's the parts bin 3-way switch, the pots, or the pickups. The pots were frozen solid when I got the thing, so they very well could be trash. That said, I am getting the most noise when futzing with the switch; there was a reason why I had replaced it on my Explorer, as it felt a little on the loose side. I may have to just bite the bullet and replace all the pots and the switch. It's still worth the investment; the thing looks and feels great.
For reference, here's the wiring cavity before I replaced the switch.
Seems like your standard Jazz Bass style harness, but there's a switch and some filter caps and the pots are 500k instead of 250k. I was thinking of just getting a pre-made harness like this:
This is a "guitar" harness, but other than the filter caps, it seems to be identical. Any reason why I couldn't just stab this in there?
A fellow is absolutely swimming in 4x12s rn.
Tony Sestito said:
This is a "guitar" harness, but other than the filter caps, it seems to be identical. Any reason why I couldn't just stab this in there?
A potentiometer doesn't care if it's in a guitar or bass. If it fits what you have, then it's pretty easy to change out a capacitor if you want to adjust
Thanks to MusiciansFriend deal of the hour on black Friday I have acquired a neat little Fender acoustic.
The neck is slim, like a modern Strat. At first the unplugged tone seemed pretty weak, especially compared to my big old dreadnaught shape acoustics, but I think I've been learning that it just responds to a slightly different playing style. It does the high end shimmer thing pretty well, where suspended chords and open tunings sound really good. I think its a nice contrast in my current acoustic lineup.
BlueInGreen - Jon said:
Tony Sestito said:
This is a "guitar" harness, but other than the filter caps, it seems to be identical. Any reason why I couldn't just stab this in there?
A potentiometer doesn't care if it's in a guitar or bass. If it fits what you have, then it's pretty easy to change out a capacitor if you want to adjust
Yeah, that's what I figured. I have a cheap harness on the way. I'll try it as-is, but I am guessing it will need those caps swapped on. Not a big deal.
500k pots will make the bass sound much brighter, 250k is what you want for bass really.
I've played around with them, it makes a huge difference
Today, I tried wiring up that new harness. It seems like a no-go. With it wired in, I couldn't get anything out of the pickups. I then tried to just reinstall the old harness with the switch that was on the new harness, to see if maybe both of my old switches were bad. Nope, same farty, fuzzy sounds. And this time, for some reason, the J-pickup volume is controlled by the tone pot. I really thought I had it wired correctly.
I then thought to myself: how is a REAL Jazz Bass Special wired up? After some Googling, I found this:
Biggest differences are that these are 500k pots (yes, I know it will be bright and loud) and that my pickup wires are red and black. I am assuming that the red = white in this case. But what I'll try and do here is mimic this diagram with the new bits and see where that gets me. It's also possible that these pickups are garbage, but at least if I wire it up like the diagram above, I can rule everything else out.
