funkle

Quick cross post to the 'P vs reverse P' thread with my observations after borrowing @krispn's bass. Thanks Gav!

I have had the pleasure of borrowing @krispn's (Gav's) Precision with flats, and comparing to my own. A very instructive evening last night and morning. Played through my amp setup (The Basschat FRFR 12" design) and headphones. Gav's is on the left, and is alder body, rosewood board, and strung with TI flats. His has a P pickup in the usual spot, but with the coils reversed. He also has a Precision neck, with more mass and larger nut width. Mine is on the right, and is alder body, Brazilian rosewood neck, and strung with D'Addario Chromes flats. It sports the usual pickup orientation and position. Jazz neck and Jazz nut width. Recognising that the two basses are not 100% alike, and trying to allow as best as I can for that, I do notice what I have done with other basses I have tried with a reversed P, which is that the reverse P makes the string balance a lot more even from top to bottom. It still sounds like a Precision - mostly - but it does get rid of the typical bark. By comparison, I find my bass to have a little more low end and a bit more thinness to the D and G strings, with the expected 'bark'. I very much doubt anyone apart from a bass player would notice, but since we're all very focused on the bass around here, I will say the reversed P does not sound quite like a typical Precision. It sounds great though! Just different. The project bass I'm working on (see https://www.basschat.co.uk/topic/440973-dual-p-pickup-bass-modding-a-mexi-fender/) may yet end up with a reversed front P, I'm not sure. I have had for that brief that I maintain the typical Precision sound, but I am now wondering if the reversed front P is worthwhile. Thanks to @krispn for letting me borrow his bass!

Sweet. I would love to compare. I’ll message you.

So, I took the plunge for a Fender roasted maple Jazz neck. This was exactly what I was looking for. I really do not get on with rosewood boards that well, and the snap of maple is exactly what I wanted. It sounds no different to other non roasted maple necks, but it looks nice and was a direct fit to the body with no footering about there needed. Very light neck indeed, and it appears to all be a single piece of maple. I cannot see a separate piece of maple for the fretboard. Cool. Had to fit the tuners (Hipshot Licensed Ultralites), string tree, and file down the nut. Classic mistake overfilling the G string slot, rescued with superglue. I chipped it a bit too; still needs further filing down for overall height, but it works. Key learning here for roasted maple: this wood is very hard, drill pilot holes for all screws and use a little candle wax to screw them in. I might fit an EQ to it sometime. Still toying with the idea of reversing the neck pickup...best to live with it as it is for a while though, I think.

I can see I’m a bit late to this thread, but I’m very supportive of Ibanez. My one needed some doing up - neck dive otherwise - but it’s my go to 5er now. See the thread below. I have owned Modulus, Musicman, Yamaha, Peavey, Pedulla, and many other 5ers. This one gets the job done for cheap (even after mods). It also has 18mm string spacing whilst having a great neck.

Ok, an update. Here’s how it looks now: First thing to say, after experimenting more with bridge pickups, the Seymour Duncan SPB3 (Quarter Pounder) is a great match for the SPB1 at the neck. The thread about dual P pickup basses on Talkbass has this as a common combination, and with good reason. It sounds good. After a lot of work, I think what I have found is that the bridge pickup position best suits a pickup with big bass and big treble. Too much mid in this position just gets a bit too nasally for my taste. The DiMarzio Model P, for instance, works less well here IMO, because it is basically a ‘more of everything’ pickup frequency wise. It sounds fab at the front position though! I used car paint and clear car lacquer on the rear pickup cover to get the colour closer to the body. I now know quite closely the term ‘overspray’ and I can tell you if there are mistakes to be made whilst spray painting, I probably made them. The job is ok but could probably do with me sanding it all back and redoing it completely, but I’m not going to do that, lol. But it looks decent. Once I finished doing the pickup testing, I put a white pickguard back on. Slightly ‘mint’ shade. The chrome electronics cover was convenient for ease of access to electronics, but I think I do like the pickguard aesthetic, and once I finished the testing, I didn’t need easy access anymore, so... I very nearly tried reversing the neck pickup orientation. I think it probably would let the pickups blend better, from reports I read on Talkbass. However, the two ways of doing this (either keeping position same and reversing the orientation of each half, or moving the DG coil closer to the neck by moving it to the other side of the EA coil) both change the ‘Precision’ nature of the sound of the neck pickup considerably, at least IMO. I can’t bring myself to do it, a Precision’s fundamental sound is just too cool. As it is, it sounds like a gnarlier PJ bass. I think of it as being a Precision (so front pickup mostly being run at 100% and blending in different amounts of rear pickup) as opposed to being like a Jazz, where both pickups together is probably my favourite sound. Both pickups fully on together here sounds good, but I’m not sure if it was really worth the effort over many PJ setups. (Assuming the J pickup is a humbucker in those setups, never understood why people introduced single coil hum in that setup). The rear pickup on its own is like a beefier, angrier Jazz pickup. You can definitely 'Jaco out' there now and it is not nasally or clavinet-ish now. It’s fun. If I had my time again, I’d move the rear pickup DG coil right up against the back of the Precision pickguard, and of course start with it being reversed. It just works better. I think I will shell out for a maple Jazz neck on this. I prefer the nut width and the high end spank of maple. But it’s a personal project, very much my bass now, lol. On the whole, for economic effectiveness, I think I would simply say to most people they should just buy a PJ bass, and get most of the same sound without the effort. A split coil Jazz pickup at the rear will get much of the sound without the hassle. Or a Nordstrand Big Split, I bet.

My experience of electro-acoustic basses have all been disappointing. The larger body ones, not the thin line types mostly shown here They all need plugged in, and once plugged in, they do the thing that solid body guitars were designed to avoid - they feed back. Plus the bridges are usually not that easily adjustable. A fun idea that doesn’t work out in my experience.

I continue to read my way through the Shadows of Motown book. I have learned a lot and my reading has improved a ton, unsurprisingly. This is one of the best things I have done on bass. I can only recommend it.

Just scored a Seymour Duncan Quarter Pounder (SPB3) which I will test out for the bridge. Now that I have the new loom with 500k pots, I will also go back and test out the DiMarzio P again at the bridge position too. (After I had lived with the DiMarzios for a while, I felt that they had a lot of high mids but lost treble up top. I wonder if the 4x 250k pot loading bled off too much high end, looking back. Ah well, nothing to do but try it out again with the new setup!) I might try spray painting the black pickup surround as well, found some Halfords paint which is the same colour as the bass (I think) and I have some primer kicking about as well. All good fun...

They really are. The Precision Bass is, in its existing form, well designed and well researched. That has become clear to me as I have experimented. It is really easy to actually take away from its excellent design and sound with additional pickups!

Wow, cool pickguard. I could dig on that, especially the grey translucent.

Ok, posting an update for those of you who are following. I still await a reasonably priced Seymour Duncan SPB3 to try out in the bridge position, although I may have to go back and try out pickups there that I have tried before, because...I made a few changes. One, I took off the pickguard and attached an old chrome P Bass control plate I have lying around. This makes pickup/wiring swaps much easier to test out. It also looks rad, lol. I'll need to sort out a pickguard at some point. Two, I swapped the electronics out for a stacked dual 500K volume pot and a 500k tone pot with pull switch for series mode. This change of pot values was a great idea. (Another solderless loom.) The high end has hugely opened up on this bass now. Like I said before, I could not get the high end out of the bass I wanted, and figured that all the pot loading was the problem. Well, I was right. It sounds brighter, and the pickups sound a bit different as well now too. I guess there was more pickup loading going on as well? Passive electronics are a funny beast. Anyway. I am getting used to a slightly different sound, and I like it. The bridge pickup is definitely a winner in this orientation, it just plain works better. Will post more as I get time to test bridge pickups out a bit more again. I really want to land either an SPB1 or SPB3 for the bridge pickup; I think either could work well. Pete

My honest advice is that the SBL course was worth it. I periodically revisit it still. It was far cheaper than any amp, bass, pedal, etc, and did much more for my tone than any of those.

I did the SBL ‘Technique Accelerator’ course, and just did what I was told. About 20 mins per day for 6 months just working on getting a good sound, learning how to pick, work on articulations, and similar. It’s light on music content, but I have plenty of that elsewhere. Jeff Berlin would not approve - but it did focus me on working out some flaws in technique that I have. Biggest change for me was improving my tone with finger style - absolutely ensuring that most of my strokes are ‘rest stokes’, not free strokes. This hugely improved my tone and my happiness in my own sound.

They do, and they work great! How cool is that. I bought them for the look but the sound is really cool.

My goodness, the 3M tri-line tape is expensive. You can only get it in a 50 metre roll, and it’s nearly £30. The guys in the videos above both do overlaps. The first one, he does a separate piece all around the edges, then does the back and then the front. The second uses 3M knifeless tape but again uses it for clean cuts and does an overlap of the front piece over the back. I’m almost tempted to do an overlap on the sides of the bass just to avoid paying £30 for the tape!

Of interest..other people wrapping a bass..

Agreed. Getting the details right is key. Although, I will say...some of the issues I have gotten into in the past has been obsessing over some details that were less important than they turned out to be. Living with a bass for a while before doing anything to it was pretty instructive.

So you all likely know my propensity to modify or tweak what I buy. This thread follows my tendency in that... I recent years, I have found that a lot more is about the player than the instrument (to a large degree, anyway), so I might as well buy a cheaper instrument and tweak it to my liking than hack up an expensive bass. Though I do own expensive instruments, increasingly I am getting a lot of joy from cheaper ones. Now. I became quite entranced with the sound of the Stingray in my youth, but always found they sounded worse in my hands than in someone else's. At least, until I spent about 6 months working on my right hand technique a while back. I bought and sold 5-6 Stingrays for this reason. Now, I am happy with how they sound when I play them, but it turns out I really dislike the 3EQ versions, and eventually I realised the sounds I liked best were 'older' Stingrays. I also favour Jazz width necks over Stingray or Precision necks; getting an SLO Special Stingray looks a very expensive affair. Not to be mean, but I happen to think Stingrays are mostly a one trick pony, and I can't face stumping up huge amounts of money for that, much as I like them now. So the goal became getting 'the sound' without forking out for a Stingray Classic or a vintage Stingray. So, in many ways, a Ray4 fit the bill. I bought a Ray4 a year and a half ago - the videos by JuliaPlaysBass on Youtube giving me confidence in doing so. It got about 80-90% of the way to the sound I wanted, and I played it stock for about a year. Good value for money, although I did get the frets levelled and get a new nut installed. (The original nut needed filing down to be properly playable, which I did at home, but a proper fret level by a luthier made the instrument feel just great to play). Eventually, I replaced the tuners with an old set of Hipshot Licensed Ultralites I had lying around, because the original tuners were not that great, and it felt like I was invested in the instrument after a while. That was a nice upgrade. I had to shim the Ultralite tuners to fit the holes, but it was worthwhile. I just used electrical tape, worked fine. I quite like the very practical ethic of not filling the old tuner screw holes, gives a kind of industrial look. So. As I continued to play the instrument, I realised I wouldn't mind putting more into it, as it had taken on something more personal to me. I did a lot of research using Low End Lobsters series on modding his Ray4s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrGKPGOKp9M and the Mold Smoothie Project https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRkzMzjkD58) and ended up purchasing the John East 2 band MMSR EQ (without plate to make it cheaper) and the Aguilar AG4M. That got me 'the sound' plus a bit more, as the EQ has a slightly bigger range than the original. The install was easy - John's products are brilliant in my opinion - but I got a bit of hum out of the Aguilar, which I did not expect. I ended up shielding the pickup cavity, which seemed to do the trick. I do have a fairly electrically noisy household, so it's good at picking up issues like this. The Aguilar is a 'vintage style' Stingray pickup, so perhaps it wasn't surprising to get some vintage aspects to it, lol. So, now I had the sound. However.....the bridge had been a subtle annoyance to me that I tolerated for a long time, because the instrument was inexpensive, but replacing the bridge felt a bit wasteful to me. It's a perfectly good bridge, and I have never found the magic in a bridge change that many people talk about, though I have swapped plenty in my time. Eventually, I realised that I could try to fit an old Stingray mute set on there, which would allow some flexibility if I desired it, and also look a lot better. Bass Direct sells them for £28 shipped...so, I bought a set. Turns out, the long metal plates of the mutes fit perfectly under the existing Ray4 bridge without having to modify the bridge or bass in any way. Sweet. I spent a long time looking for inserts to put into the wood under the bridge for the mute screws to fit into, but I could not find a supplier here or in the USA for the right size. Strange, but there it is. I bought a few of different sizes just to try them, but the screws never worked right in them - either too small or too large. I dug out old pics of vintage Stingrays with the bridges and hardware removed, and it turned out that it looked like those screws simply went directly into the wood, not an insert. I also messaged Low End Lobster to ask him if that is what he had done with his bass, and he said he simply screwed them directly into the wood as well, and it worked fine. So, one 4mm drill bit and a lot of measuring later, this is how it ended up... It's not perfect - the hole I drilled for the screw through the bridge under the G string was 1mm off where I wanted it to go, even though I used a centre punch - but it looks right, and furthermore, the mutes are totally useable and the sound is very cool. Even with some candle wax to lubricate the screws when I screwed them in to the bass, they are a slow turn, so it's not instant adjustability, but a minute or two will allow me to return it to the 'non-muted' sound. The finished article. I need no more mods. This has been a real labour of love, over a long period of time, and I am really happy with it. It's cheaper than any of the options I might otherwise have had to consider given my requisites, but it's difficult to recommend it if you're not as picky about necks/EQ etc as I am. A secondhand SBMM Ray34 or similar is better value, though those don't have the forearm contour that I think is critical either. But you get the gist. I think I spent around £600 all together, and it looks and sounds great. This is now, finally, my 'Stingray'. Pete

I had thought about a contrast stripe. What a great idea, though, to start with the butt joint and then cover it if needed. I'm waiting on 4 testers of colour swatches now to arrive, so I can figure out which one to use. I'm going to wrap an old Fender HM Bass I picked up in a 3M colour - choice of carbon fibre, gloss deep blue metallic, gloss flip psychedelic, or gloss charcoal metallic. Carbon fibre might be too much of a challenge, but I want to see what it looks like anyway.

Ah, you are a star, thanks for that. That’s about where I planned to try the butt joint. However the belly contour on the upper part of the bass is a challenge. I might opt for the overlap after all.