budget bassist

I bought a Preamp from Stevie, the transaction was very easy, he posted it when he said he would, the preamp came undamaged and he provided a wiring diagram too. Very happy, cheers.

If they're named after a particular brand or model of amp, they'll be paying a certain amount to that brand I would imagine. I know several manufacturers are working together on amp sim software like Amplitube. Why would they not? It's another market.

I just don't 'get' fender basses in general. They're expensive, don't play that well and sound boring. All in my own opinion of course.

Ok, so after some trial and error, it doesn't work... I've used the SD pickup as al mentioned above, red+black for hot and the rest as cold. I've tried soldering it and the status pickup both ways around on the B and W inputs on the bongo pre, and when plugged into an amp, the preamp seems to work to a degree... there is buzz, and the buzz becomes louder when i touch the strings, which means the preamp is active, and the grounding works, but there is absolutely zero output from the pickups. This seems a little funny to me, as there's nothing wrong with the pickups, and the wiring isn't exactly complicated... it seems to be that there is an issue with the preamp itself? Anyway, I'm thinking of just buying another preamp or going passive. Can anyone recommend a decent pre with a dual pickup input, with a vol, blend and 2-band EQ layout that doesn't cost the earth? Looking at the John East musicman knockoff ones, but they only seem to cater for the single pickup stingray owners... This is really winding me up, as this bass should sound/play great when it works, but I can't get it to work!

Looks good mate. I believe the body wood on those is mahogany. Tru oil is exactly the right stuff to use for a nice simple natural finish.

Sold cameron a CD, he had to wait a while for it as I didn't have it to hand at the time, but no fuss at all cheers

Sold Geoff a broken amp head, had a few issues with the courier (through no fault of either of us) but other than that was a nice smooth transaction and he was a really nice guy to deal with. Cheers!

I know I've not bothered with this in a while, the bass has been at my parents house while I've been at university for the last couple of years and I've never been home long enough to really look at getting it sorted. Now I'm home for the summer though and don't have a job this year, so I needed something to fill some time, so I made some actual progress today! The other day I took the Basslines pickup out to have a look at how it was wired as the available info on the internet is less than helpful, and noticed it was a bit ropey, so I re-soldered all of the joints there so it was a bit nicer and not falling apart any more, no photos of that though. I spent a good while trying to figure out how the pre and the pickups were actually wired, as all of the info on the seymour duncan site/everywhere else explained how to wire the pickup to a stingray preamp/some other preamp etc, the bongo preamp is pretty weird and is only really specific to MM pickups, so I had to get my head around a stock MM pickup and how to wire it all, it's probably not as complicated as it sounds, but the way it's all laid out was pretty confusing. Anyway, today I managed to get it all wired up. I've done a couple of tests and the pickups have output, the preamp has output, and I [i]think[/i] it's working as it should, but I don't have a working amp here, so I may have to wait to test it out properly. I still need to sort the hardware out and get it all bolted together again, and perhaps sort out the control cavity, as it's a little cramped with two batteries in there, but it's coming together. I may look at refinishing it at some point as well, it's a little tatty at the moment. Here's where I'm up to anyway: [IMG]http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y138/metallica_rock/IMG_0223.jpg[/IMG] [IMG]http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y138/metallica_rock/IMG_0224.jpg[/IMG]