hubrad

Reading the above, are you actually after more of a baseline with percussive accents? I know a couple of guys who are awesome on the ratatatat rockabilly slapping, but it's not where I wanted to be. Anything like this?

Excellent! My next suggestion was going to be to double check all the connectors were the right way round. Glad it's sorted. 👍

I'm assuming you have the EMG pots among the kit? Quite different values at 25 or 50k as opposed to 250/500. I've used loads of EMG over the years, and done alot with wiring, and not had this problem with them.

Couple of things spring to mind.. the 4 pickup is a little smaller than the 5. Under the 5 plate, between the pickup and controls, there's routing for controls, look at the switch. I'd be inclined to do some mockups in cardboard, then once finalised you can give that/those to someone who makes plates for a really neat job. That's unless you have those cutting and chamfering skills yourself, in which case the world is your oyster*. *Other shellfish, and vegetarian options, are available.

Revive.. I just realised the photos went the way of history, probs in the site change a few years back. I'll see if I can find them on a storage drive somewhere.

Eyup Mick, My first reaction is let this guy get away to re-form with ex-drummer and find yourselves a singer who's up for working as a band. Painfully more work short term, but most likely less pain long term, fingers crossed!

Eyup Smanth, When I converted my Ibanez Roadster to 5 string headless (I think the build diary is still on here from tidying it up a couple of decades later) I used the bridge and head string anchor from my B2V. A little later i fashioned a clamping thing for single ball strings; the choice nowadays is luxury compared to 30 years back! I only had hand tools, so the holes aren't perfectly straight, but you get the idea. Maybe you have a friend who is better than I was at engineering diy? The only thing I found against the idea was that once you cut off the leftover bit of the lower strings they can unravel with no warning, so even though the outer windings remain clamped the inner pulls through, leaving a very slack string! Super glue in the trimmed end proved to be the solution to this. Hope this is helpful.

My tupporth.. I got a Cort 5 string with those MK-1 pickups and possibly the same preamp. Sounded OK, but on the harsh side. I did alot of reading round on forum threads, and most folks were critical of the pre. As am experiment I bypassed the pre and got a significant improvement in tone just from the Barts, so cast around and here on BC found a second hand Aguilar OPB-3. Way better than before! Change or bypass the pre before changing the pickups is my vote.

50 mins on the phone seems like a good sign.. I occasionally dep with a soul band and have probably spent more time on the phone with the guitarist, a friend of a friend, than actually playing music! We can disagree on some things but still talk about them.

Sorry to hear about the health stuff! I know what you mean about the buying and selling addiction.. I frequent a couple of other forums in other fields, and the same thing happens. Easy to be drawn into it, and sometimes quite a down to step back from it! Mind you there's tons of other stuff going on inbetween all that part so well worth staying around for me.

I just bought some strings from Charlie.. they arrived swift and safe, just as described. Many thanks for a smooth transaction!

This. ^^^ Unless the socket is fixed onto the chassis then a loose or broken solder joint is remarkably common. Manufacturers do it this way for cheapness, deffo not reliability, and I hate it! If it does turn out to be the socket itself you may need to contact the manufacturer or distributor for a replacement, but alternatively you can buy a chassis mount socket and wire it to the pcb. As soldering jobs go, it's one of the safer ones, just take it steady. Edit: Rereading your last post, it probably is a replacement socket job. The hardest bit is usually actually getting hold of a direct replacement, or as I've sometimes done just wire in a different one.

Am I the only one hanging onto this thread and waiting to hear if there's a match on this? I love a good back story! Or did it get taken to pm to protect the innocent?

Crumbs! Hope your friend is ok. As you say, sucks on so many levels.

Eyup ead, when you say you inverted the pickup, did you invert the whole thing, i.e. both halves, or just one half relative to the other? If the whole thing it may just be that you altered its pickup direction so it's not getting whatever is causing the problem. Is it worse when you stand near such as TV, strip lights etc? 'Fraid I have no experience of the passive EMG, just actives which I like alot. However, as with any sealed pickup, if anything goes amiss inside it's skip time!

Or, indeed, the rabbit vs rabbit hole..

You neeeed a bit of Melissa Etheridge in there!